Utah State University

Chien-Min Huang

Paul D Israelsen

Scott Ezra Budge

Richard W Harris

Kyminh Liang

The invention relates to a method and system for allocating bits for representing blocks that are transmitted in an image compression system. In a preferred embodiment, a video telephone communications system includes a video transmitting/receiving (transceiving) system including local and remote processing systems separated by a communications link. The local processing system determines indices to be sent to a remote processing system to represent the image. Under one aspect of the invention, the local processing system determines an optimal bit allocation in which the following relationship may be minimized DR=D+.lambda.R, where D is the total distortion .SIGMA.d.sub.i for a frame; .lambda. is a value determined as described below; R=.SIGMA.r.sub.i .apprxeq.R.sub.d which is the desired total number of bits for the frame. The optimal bit allocation may determine .lambda. for an entire frame. Under other aspects of the invention a lambda feedback technique, with or without predecision, may be used. The lambda feedback techniques may determine .lambda. block by block. Conditional update preselection and mode preselection are other reduced complexity procedures.

Bit allocation for sequence image compression

An N-stage vector quantizer in which increasingly smaller portions of a vector are compared to a threshold until the quantization error is less than the threshold. The threshold may be adaptive to insure a constant bit rate. The first stage performs VQ and inverse VQ on an input vector. The difference between the inverse VQ and the input vector is determined to create a first stage residual error. If the first stage residual error is less than a threshold, no further stages of the multistage vector quantizer are used and the input vector or first stage residual is passed on to the output stage. However, if the first stage residual error is not less than the threshold, the residual error is passed to stage two of the multistage vector quantizer where VQ and inverse VQ are performed on the first stage residual error. The process is continued until the residual is less than the threshold. If the Nth stage is reached without the residual being less than the threshold, the process is repeated on a smaller portion of the original input vector. For example, if the original input vector were a 16.times.16 vector, the smaller section could be a 16.times.8 vector.

Hierarchical adaptive multistage vector quantization

A fixed quality source coder receives and performs VQ on an input signal I.sub.D. The signal I.sub.D may be characterized by the number of samples/frame and bits per sample, and may be provided by a traditional source coder. The traditional source coder may include a sample-and-hold (S/H) circuit producing rxs samples/frame and an ADC providing n bits per pixel. In a first embodiment, the number of bits/sample is increased. In the second embodiment, the number of samples/frame is increased. In a third embodiment, both the number of bits/sample and the number of samples/frame are increased. Measurements made in simulations involving the first and second embodiments show that the fixed quality source coder has a smaller data rate, mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square error (RMSE) than that of the traditional source coder, while maintaining the same or less maximum error. The fixed quality source coder includes an encoder and may also include a decoder. The encoder may include a lossy codec that receives and encodes the signal I.sub.D to provide encoded information to a multiplexer regarding the signal I.sub.D. The lossy codec also decodes the encoded signal to produce a decoded signal I.sub.VQ.sup.-1. A summer receives I.sub.D and I.sub.VQ.sup.-1 and determines an error signal E.sub.R, where E.sub.R may equal I.sub.D -I.sub.VQ.sup.-1. A threshold circuit receives the signal E.sub.R and passes a threshold signal E.sub.T, where a threshold level T may be set to ensure that the maximum error allowed in the encoder is equal to a particular desired maximum error.

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Logan, UT, United States of America

Chien-Min Huang