A general codebook design method for vector quantization

Vector quantization (VQ) is widely used in image processing applications, the primary focus of VQ is to determine a codebook to represent the original image well. In order to make a codebook perform better on both distortion and bit rate (BR), a general codebook (GCB) for VQ is proposed in this paper. Unlike common codebook (CCB) or private codebook (PCB), GCB is a new structure of codebook where the codewords can either come from CCB or by training the input image. By applying the codewords in CCB that perform well and updating inactive codewords, only the new generated codewords and flags of codewords to be replaced are transmitted along with index table (IT). Therefore,the BR can be significantly reduced while the performance of distortion can be efficiently improved. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed GCB has a better performance than CCB and various kinds of PCB-based methods.