Optimal Multiresolution Quantization for Scalable Multimedia Coding

We have investigated the problem of designing an optimal entropy-constrained multiresolution scalar quantizer under the criterion of minimizing the expected distortion weighted by the probability of transmission rate and for arbitrary probability mass function of signal amplitude. An O(LN/sup 3/) algorithm is proposed to solve the optimization problem, where L is the number of refinement stages, and N is the size of input symbol alphabet. The proposed algorithm is globally optimal, and furthermore, it is more general than its locally optimal predecessors in terms of quantizer structures.