A modified belief propagation algorithm for code word quantization

Modern coding advances, including dirty paper coding and information hiding, require quantizing a given binary word to a code word. A ´good´ solution would approach the rate-distortion bound in lossy source compression. Here we propose a simple variant on belief propagation which is observed to converge to a solution giving respectable rate-distortion performance. Comparisons with other recently proposed source quantization methods reveal that the proposed algorithm holds particular interest in short block-length applications, as encountered in packet-based communication systems.