Customer Reviews

Vector Quantization and Signal Compression (The Springer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

An essential book for researchers and engineers working on vector quantization. It provides a (nearly) exhaustive description of the available VQ methods, with analyses and discussions. The book concentrates on VQ, so don't buy it if you're not interested in that only. Most math tools explained. Could be a little bit outdated on some aspects -> things are moving fast in the field.

Many useful concepts of digital compression can be found in this book. It is easy to read and understand, especially for students and engineers in EE.

This book appears to be a "print on demand" style book which manifests itself, in this case, as a poor quality hardcover. Some of the text is laughably bad, the few images near the end look like they are snapshots from a black and white TV screen, but most bothersome is the "muddy" look of the text. The price seems a bit steep for such a poor quality print. That said, the actual content is very comprehensive. One of the authors (Gray) is co-creator of the now commonplace LBG (Linde Buzo Gray) VQ algorithm. Fortunately, the quality of the content shines through the terrible printing.

It seems somebody was complaining for the printing quality. This is not a calculus book. If you take most theoretical books, and certainly most Springer's book, they don't have nice full color Barney images. This is technical (mostly theoretical) stuff. There is, in my opinion, no problem with the printing at all, clear, quality monochromatic printing.

With respect to the contents of the book, it has almost everything you may want to know about Vector (and even Scalar) quantization and Signal compression. It was a great help while I was writing my doctoral thesis. Gray is probably one of the most respected authorities in the field.

It seems that authors have pictures unrelated to content of the text repeatedly printed. It does not cover major topics, such as .gif/ graphic file compression. On the positive side it is well-written, organized, multiple equation in some chapters, descriptive in others. Very little mathematical proof.