A Step - Wise Search Approach to Fixed - rateEntropy - coded

This report describes a new xed-rate entropy-constrained quantization scheme for stationary memoryless sources where the structure of code-words is derived from a variable-length scalar quantizer. This method is a sequential encoding algorithm which looks for the quantizer partition in a number of steps. It starts from the quantization points which result in the minimum distance among the available candidates, and then in each step tries to reduce a given cost value 1 by changing the quantizer point along an appropriately selected dimension. The algorithm continues til the total cost of the encoded codeword becomes smaller than its maximum allowable value. We show that the step-wise algorithm results in a substantial reduction in the complexity, while the associated degradation in the performance is negligible.