• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.40 no.7
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• pp.1217-1233
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• 2015

The paper studies characteristics of the minimum mean-square error symmetric scalar quantizers for the generalized gamma, Bucklew-Gallagher and Hui-Neuhoff probability density functions. Toward this goal, asymptotic formulas for the inner- and outermost thresholds, and distortion are derived herein for nonuniform quantizers for the Bucklew-Gallagher and Hui-Neuhoff densities, parallelling the previous studies for the generalized gamma density, and optimal uniform and nonuniform quantizers are designed numerically and their characteristics tabulated for integer rates up to 20 and 16 bits, respectively, except for the Hui-Neuhoff density. The assessed asymptotic formulas are found consistently more accurate as the rate increases, essentially making their asymptotic convergence to true values numerically acceptable at the studied bit range, except for the Hui-Neuhoff density, in which case they are still consistent and suggestive of convergence. Also investigated is the uniqueness problem of the differentiation method for finding optimal step sizes of uniform quantizers: it is observed that, for the commonly studied densities, the distortion has a unique local minimizer, hence showing that the differentiation method yields the optimal step size, but also observed that it leads to multiple solutions to numerous generalized gamma densities.