Video compression for portable communication using pyramid vector quantization of subband coefficients

The authors describes a video compression scheme that performs pyramid vector quantization (PVQ) of subband coefficients and a VLSI architecture for the PVQ decoder. This algorithm not only provides good compression performance, but also results in a low complexity, low power VLSI implementation. Furthermore, this algorithm demonstrates good error resiliency under severe channel distortion without the use of error correction codes. PVQ also allows encoding and decoding to be computation-based instead of memory-based, as in standard VQ, thus allowing for real-time video coding and eliminating the need for large memories. The algorithm and its performance are described in detail, and the chip architecture of the PVQ decoder is presented