Fast closest codeword search algorithm for vector quantization

One of the most serious problems for vector quantisation is the high computational complexity of searching for the closest codeword in the codebook design and encoding phases. The authors present a fast algorithm to search for the closest codeword. The proposed algorithm uses two significant features of a vector, mean value and variance, to reject many unlikely codewords and saves a great deal of computation time. Since the proposed algorithm rejects those codewords that are impossible to be the closest codeword, this algorithm introduces no extra distortion than conventional full search method. The results obtained confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.