Contour vector quantization and waveform coding

Motivated by the implicit geometry of a stationary, ergodic process, a vector quantizer (VQ) design algorithm is proposed, based on a contour of constant probability density. The approach is explicitly related to the differential entropy of the source, and uses this characteristic of the source to provide structure for the location of VQ output, vectors. A correlated Gaussian source is treated in detail and used as an appropriate model for the design of a contour gain VQ for speech. The resulting mean-square error performance is competitive with alternative VQ based results in the literature.