From mixtures of mixtures to adaptive transform coding

We establish a principled framework for adaptive transform coding. Transform coders are often constructed by concatenating an ad hoc choice of transform with suboptimal bit allocation and quantizer design. Instead, we start from a probabilistic latent variable model in the form of a mixture of constrained Gaussian mixtures. From this model we derive a transform coding algorithm, which is a constrained version of the generalized Lloyd algorithm for vector quat design. A byproduct o our derivatn is the introduction of a new transform basis, which unlike other transforms (PCA DCT, etc.) is explicitly optimized for coding. Image compression experiments show adaptive transform coders designed with our algorithm improve compressed image signal-to-noise ratio up to 3 dB compared to global transform codi and 0.5 to 2 dB compared to other adaptive trm coderes.