Joint source-channel vector quantization using deterministic annealing

A new approach to the combined source-channel vector quantizer design problem is presented. The method utilizes deterministic annealing to avoid local minima that trap conventional descent algorithms. The temperature is used to control the fuzziness of the encoder and decoder association probabilities. In the low temperature limit, the method reduces to a descent method that is an analog of the generalized Lloyd algorithm (GLA) for noisy channels. Thus, in this sense, it is a generalization of noisy channel GLA (NC-GLA). Simulations were performed in order to compare the approach with several versions of NC-GLA. The method outperformed the other methods under all test conditions. Moreover, the gains over other methods grow with the codebook size