Image Coding by Adaptive Block Quantization

A new source encoder called the adaptive block quantizer is proposed for coding data sources that emit a sequence of correlated real numbers with known first- and second-order statistics, Blocks of source output symbols are first classified and then block quantized in a manner that depends on their classification. The system is optimized relative to both the mean square error and the subjective quality of the reconstructed data for a certain class of pictorial data, and the resulting system performance demonstrated. Some interesting relationships between mean square error and subjective picture quality are presented.