An improvement of the minimum distortion encoding algorithm for vector quantization

In this note we present a very simple method for improving the efficiency of minimum distortion encoding for vector quantization. Simulations indicates a reduction of up to 70 percent in the number of multiplications for a full search vector quantizer with a large number of codewords, and about 25-40 percent for a tree search vector quantizer. Similar improvement can be achieved in other vector quantization systems.