A fast vector quantization encoding method for image compression

This paper presents a general search method to speed up the encoding process for vector quantization. The method exploits the topological structure of the codebook to dynamically eliminate the code vectors for encoding a particular input vector and thus decrease the number of distance calculations which require very intensive computations. The relations between the proposed method and several existing fast algorithms are discussed. Based on the proposed method, a new fast encoding algorithm for vector quantization is developed. Simulation results demonstrate that with little preprocessing and memory cost, the encoding time of the new algorithm has been reduced significantly while encoding quality remains the same with respect to exhaustive search