ADAPTIVE HIERARCHICAL SUBBAND VECTOR QUANTIZATION ENCODER

A method system for data reduction of digital video signals based on vector quantization of vectors formed from coefficients of a discrete cosine transform of pixel blocks. The coefficients are grouped into subbands and both scalar and vector quantization are used. Vector quantization is implemented either directly on the vectors or on vectors formed from inter-frame differences between the transformed vectors. The vector quantization searching routine is in accordance with the Voronoi regions resulting from an off-line codeword clustering method using a minimum distance criterion.