Patent ID: 8706481

Claim:
A method of multi-path trellis coded quantization, the method comprising: calculating, using a processor, accumulated distortions corresponding to 2N survivor paths, wherein N indicates an integer not less than two, such that 2N indicates an integer not less than four, each of the 2N survivor paths going towards one of nodes at an i th stage of a trellis, and i indicates an integer not less than zero, the calculating accumulated distortions including: calculating a distortion between representative values selected from a sub-codebook which is allocated to a branch corresponding to the i th stage of the trellis and calculated predicted errors at the i th stage of the trellis; and calculating the accumulated distortion of the i th stage by using calculated distortion; and comparing the accumulated distortions respectively corresponding to the 2N survivor paths to select N paths among the 2N survivor paths, wherein the accumulated distortions corresponding to selected N paths are smaller than the accumulated distortions corresponding to unselected N paths; establishing the selected N paths as survivor paths going toward an i+1 th stage; and selecting an optimal path among the 2N survivor paths corresponding to each node of an i+2 th stage, wherein the calculating of the distortion between representative values and the predicted errors calculates the distortion by applying a predetermined weight to a difference between the prediction errors and the selected representative values, and wherein the optimal path is dismissed when only one survivor path is saved for one node at each stage.