Distribution Preserving Quantization With Dithering and Transformation

A new quantization scheme that preserves the probability distribution of the source signal is presented. The distribution preserving quantization (DPQ) achieves the optimal trade-off between mean square error and bit rate asymptotically. It provides a continuum ranging from rate-distortion optimal signal quantization to parametric coding. The method can be used as a core component for scalable coding. Its efficacy is illustrated by applying the scheme to audio coding.