Scalar quantization with random thresholds

The distortion-rate performance of certain randomly-designed scalar quantizers is determined. The central results are the mean-squared error distortion and output entropy for quantizing a uniform random variable with thresholds drawn independently from a uniform distribution. The distortion is at mo...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Goyal, Vivek K.
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research Laboratory of Electronics
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2012
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/71923
Description
Summary:The distortion-rate performance of certain randomly-designed scalar quantizers is determined. The central results are the mean-squared error distortion and output entropy for quantizing a uniform random variable with thresholds drawn independently from a uniform distribution. The distortion is at most six times that of an optimal (deterministically-designed) quantizer, and for a large number of levels the output entropy is reduced by approximately (1-γ)/(ln 2) bits, where γ is the Euler-Mascheroni constant. This shows that the high-rate asymptotic distortion of these quantizers in an entropy-constrained context is worse than the optimal quantizer by at most a factor of 6e[superscript -2(1-γ)] ≈ 2.58.