Constrained-storage vector quantization with a universal codebook

Many compression applications consist of compressing multiple sources with significantly different distributions. In the context of vector quantization (VQ) these sources are typically quantized using separate codebooks. Since memory is limited in most applications, a convenient way to gracefully trade between performance and storage is needed. Earlier work addressed this problem by clustering the multiple sources into a small number of source groups, where each group shares a codebook. As a natural generalization, we propose the design of a size-limited universal codebook consisting of the union of overlapping source codebooks. This framework allows each source codebook to consist of any desired subset of the universal codevectors and provides greater design flexibility which improves the storage-constrained performance. Further advantages of the proposed approach include the fact that no two sources need be encoded at the same rate, and the close relation to universal, adaptive, and classified quantization. Necessary conditions for optimality of the universal codebook and the extracted source codebooks are derived. An iterative descent algorithm is introduced to impose these conditions on the resulting quantizer. Possible applications of the proposed technique are enumerated and its effectiveness is illustrated for coding of images using finite-state vector quantization.