Robust vector quantization by competitive learning

Competitive neural networks can be used to efficiently quantize image and video data. We discuss a novel class of vector quantizers which perform noise robust data compression. The vector quantizers are trained to simultaneously compensate channel noise and code vector elimination noise. The training algorithm to estimate code vectors is derived by the maximum entropy principle in the spirit of deterministic annealing. We demonstrate the performance of noise robust codebooks with compression results for a teleconferencing system on the basis of a wavelet image representation