Sample-Adaptive Product Quantizers with Affine Index Assignments for Noisy Channels

Abstract

When we design a robust vector quantizer (VQ) for noisy channels, an appropriate index assignment function should be contrived to minimize the channel-error effect. For relatively high rates, the complexity for finding an optimal index assignment function is too high to be implemented. To overcome such a problem, we use a structurally constrained VQ, which is called the sample-adaptive product quantizer (SAPQ) [12], for low complexities of quantization and index assignment. The product quantizer (PQ) and its variation SAPQ [13], which are based on the scalar quantizer (SQ) and thus belong to a class of the binary lattice VQ [16], have inherent error resilience even though the conventional affine index assignment functions, such as the natural binary code, are employed. The error resilience of SAPQ is observed in a weak sense through worst-case bounds. Using SAPQ for noisy channels is useful especially for high rates, e.g., > 1 bit/sample, and it is numerically shown that the channel-limit performance of SAPQ is comparable to that of the best codebook permutation of binary switching algorithm (BSA) [23]. Further, the PQ or SAPQ codebook with an affine index assignment function is used for the initial guess of the conventional clustering algorithm, and it is shown that the performance of the best BSA can be easily achieved.