Image Compression using Vector Quantization

A popular technique for source coding of image and speech data since 1980 is Vector Quantization. Day by day the use of multimedia, images and the other picture formats are rapidly increasing in a variety of application. It is very straight forward image compression approach. The technique of obtaining the compact representation of an image while maintaining all the necessary information without much data loss is referred to as Image Compression. VQ has the particular advantage of being able to exploit prior knowledge on the images to be compressed. In this method, codebook has to be generated before compression. It is not a universal approach since it cannot work well for different types of images. Vector Quantization has been observed as an efficient technique for image compression. There are main two components of VQ compression system: VQ Encoder and VQ Decoder.