On the DPCM compression of Gaussian autoregressive sequences

Differential pulse-coded modulation (DPCM) encoding of Gaussian autoregressive (AR) sequences is considered. It is pointed out that DPCM is rate-distortion inefficient at low bit rates. Simple filtering modifications are proposed and incorporated into DPCM. A rate-distortion optimization framework that results in optimal filters is presented. It is shown that the designed filters take advantage of "less significant" process spectral components in order to achieve superior rate-distortion performance. Design equations are derived, issues related to optimization and complexity addressed. It is shown that simple DPCM systems with the proposed modifications significantly outperform their standard counterparts.