Patent ID: 8750374

Claim:
A method for decoding an audio or video source signal encoded as a sequence of quantization indices, each quantization index referring to a quantization cell containing a corresponding source signal value and belonging to a partition into quantization cells, the method including one of the following steps: a) receiving an estimated probability distribution of the source signal and determining a reconstruction probability distribution based on the estimated probability distribution of the source signal by an optimization process tending to minimize a quantization error; and b) receiving the reconstruction probability distribution obtainable by an optimization process tending to minimize a weighted sum of at least a first term and a second term, wherein the first term is a quantization error and the second term is the difference between the source signal probability distribution and the reconstruction probability distribution, wherein the method further includes the step of generating, for each quantization index, a reconstructed signal value by sampling the reconstruction probability distribution wherein said reconstructed signal value lies in the quantization cell indicated by the quantization index.