Improved transmission of vector quantized data over noisy channels

The conventional channel-optimized vector quantization (COVQ) is very powerful in the protection of vector quantization (VQ) data over noisy channels. However, it suffers from the time consuming training process. A soft decoding self-organizing map (SOM) approach for VQ over noisy channels is presented. Compared with the COVQ approach, it does not require a long training time. For AWGN and fading channels, the distortion of the proposed approach is comparable to that of COVQ. Simulation confirmed that our proposed approach is a fast and practical method for VQ over noisy channels. © 2006 Springer-Verlag London Limited.