[IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, November 2002, pp. 2980-2989]

Gaussian Source Coding with Spherical Codes

Jon Hamkins and Kenneth Zeger

Abstract

A fixed rate shape-gain quantizer for the memoryless Gaussian source is proposed. The shape quantizer is constructed from wrapped spherical codes that map a sphere packing in Rk-1 onto a sphere in Rk, and the gain codebook is a globally optimal scalar quantizer. A wrapped Leech lattice shape quantizer is used to demonstrate a signal to quantization noise ratio within 1 dB of the distortion-rate function for rates above 1 bit per sample, and an improvement over existing techniques of similar complexity. An asymptotic analysis of the tradeoff between gain quantization and shape quantization is also given.