Design of successive approximation lattice vector quantizers

Two methods to overcome the problems with large vector quantization (VQ) codebooks are lattice VQ (LVQ) and product codes. The approach described in this paper takes advantage of both methods by applying residual VQ with LVQ at all stages. Using LVQ in conjunction with entropy coding is strongly motivated by the fact that entropy constrained but structurally unconstrained VQ design leads to more equally sized VQ cells. The entropy code of the first LVQ stage should aim at exploiting the statistical properties of the source. The refinement LVQ stages quantize the residuals. Simulations show that there exist certain scales of the refinement lattices yielding extraordinary performance. We focus on the search of these scales