Competitive learning and soft competition for vector quantizer design

The authors provide a convergence analysis for the Kohonen learning algorithm (KLA) with respect to vector quantizer (VQ) optimality criteria and introduce a stochastic relaxation technique which produces the global minimum but is computationally expensive. By incorporating the principles of the stochastic approach into the KLA, a deterministic VQ design algorithm, the soft competition scheme (SCS), is introduced. Experimental results are presented where the SCS consistently provided better codebooks than the generalized Lloyd algorithm (GLA), even when the same computation time was used for both algorithms. The SCS may therefore prove to be a valuable alternative to the GLA for VQ design