Smooth side-match weighted vector quantiser with variable block size for image coding

Although side-match vector quantisation (SMVQ) reduces the bit rate, the quality of image coding using SMVQ generally degenerates as the grey level transition across the boundaries of neighbouring blocks increases or decreases. The author proposes a smooth side-match weighted method to yield a state codebook according to the smoothness of the grey levels between neighbouring blocks. When a block is encoded, a corresponding weight is assigned to each neighbouring block to represent its relative importance. This smooth side-match weighted vector quantisation (SSMWVQ) achieves a higher PSNR than SMVQ at the same bit rate. Also, each block can be pre-encoded in an image, allowing each encoded block to use all neighbouring blocks to yield the state codebook in SSMWVQ, rather than using only two neighbouring blocks, as in SMVQ. Moreover, SSMWVQ selects many high-detail blocks as basic blocks to enhance the coding quality, and merges many low-detail blocks into a larger one to reduce further the bit rate. Experimental results reveal that SSMWVQ has a higher PSNR and lower bit rate than other methods.