Towards Rate-Distortion analysis of general source distributions: Property and principles

This paper decouples the complex Rate-Distortion (R-D) analysis problem by inspecting the respective influence of source distribution and quantizer design on R-D performance. First, a universal R-D property is theoretically revealed that, for any source distribution can be expressed as the product of a Scaling Factor (SF) and its remaining part, SF does not affect its derivative R-D function. Second, efficient quantizer design principles are deduced for different source distributions, which can be used as convenient R-D performance classifier and indicator when the dead-zone plus uniform threshold scalar quantizer with nearly-uniform reconstruction quantizer (DZ+UTSQ/NURQ) is applied. These two contributions bring new insight and inspiration towards the R-D analysis of various different sources, being solid infrastructure to benefit various video/image applications.