Principles of quantization

Quantization is the process of replacing analog samples with approximate values taken from a finite set of allowed values. The approximate values corresponding to a sequence of analog samples can then be specified by a digital signal for transmission, storage, or other digital processing. In this expository paper, the basic ideas of uniform quantization, companding, robustness to input power level, and optimal quantization are reviewed and explained. The performance of various schemes are compared using the ratio of signal power to mean-square quantizing noise as a criterion. Entropy coding and the ultimate theoretical bound on block quantizer performance are also compared with the simpler zero-memory quantizer.