Image Vector Quantization codec indexes filtering

Abstract

Vector Quantisation (VQ) is an efficient coding algorithm that has been widely used in the field of video and image coding, due to its fast decoding efficiency. However, the indexes of VQ are sometimes lost because of signal interference during the transmission. In this paper, we propose an efficient estimation method to conceal and recover the lost indexes on the decoder side, to avoid re-transmitting the whole image again. If the image or video has the limitation of a period of validity, re-transmitting the data wastes the resources of time and network bandwidth. Therefore, using the originally received correct data to estimate and recover the lost data is efficient in time-constrained situations, such as network conferencing or mobile transmissions. In nature images, the pixels are correlated with their neighbours and VQ partitions the image into sub-blocks and quantises them to the indexes that are transmitted; the correlation between adjacent indexes is very strong. There are two parts of the proposed method. The first is pre-processing and the second is an estimation process. In pre-processing, we modify the order of codevectors in the VQ codebook to increase the correlation among the neighbouring vectors. We then use a special filtering method in the estimation process. Using conventional VQ to compress the Lena image and transmit it without any loss of index can achieve a PSNR of 30.429 dB on the decoder. The simulation results demonstrate that our method can estimate the indexes to achieve PSNR values of 29.084 and 28.327 dB when the loss rate is 0.5% and 1%, respectively.

Keywords

• vector quantization
• image communication
• index recovery
• filtering