Image subband coding using arithmetic coded trellis coded quantization

Abstract

A method is presented for encoding memoryless sources using trellis coded quantization (TCQ) with uniform thresholds. The trellis symbols are entropy-coded using arithmetic coding. The performance of the arithmetic coded uniform threshold TCQ, for encoding the family of generalized Gaussian densities, is compared with uniform threshold quantization (UTQ) and the Shannon lower bound (SLB). At high rates, the method performs within 0.5 dB of the rate-distortion bound for the family of generalized Gaussian densities. A simple modification of the uniform codebook is shown to result in improved performance at low bit rates. The arithmetic and trellis coding method is used for encoding image subbands. Coding results for monochrome images are presented and compared with other results in the literature. Working C code that implements arithmetic coded uniform threshold TCQ can be obtained using anonymous ftp.