Quantization (sound processing)

Quantization, in mathematics and digital signal processing, is the process of mapping a large set of input values to a (countable) smaller set. Rounding and truncation are typical examples of quantization processes. Quantization is involved to some degree in nearly all digital signal processing, as the process of representing a signal in digital form ordinarily involves rounding. Quantization also forms the core of essentially all lossy compression algorithms.

The difference between an input value and its quantized value (such as round-off error) is referred to as quantization error. A device or algorithmic function that performs quantization is called a quantizer. An analog-to-digital converter is an example of a quantizer.

Because quantization is a many-to-few mapping, it is an inherently non-linear and irreversible process (i.e., because the same output value is shared by multiple input values, it is impossible in general to recover the exact input value when given only the output value).

The set of possible input values may be infinitely large, and may possibly be continuous and therefore uncountable (such as the set of all real numbers, or all real numbers within some limited range). The set of possible output values may be finite or countably infinite. The input and output sets involved in quantization can be defined in a rather general way. For example, vector quantization is the application of quantization to multi-dimensional (vector-valued) input data.

Outside the realm of signal processing, this category may simply be called rounding or scalar quantization. An ADC can be modeled as two processes: sampling and quantization. Sampling converts a voltage signal (function of time) into a discrete-time signal (sequence of real numbers). Quantization replaces each real number with an approximation from a finite set of discrete values (levels), which is necessary for storage and processing by numerical methods. Most commonly, these discrete values are represented as fixed-point words (either proportional to the waveform values or companded) or floating-point words. Common word-lengths are 8-bit (256 levels), 16-bit (65,536 levels), 32-bit (4.3 billion levels), and so on, though any number of quantization levels is possible (not just powers of two). Quantizing a sequence of numbers produces a sequence of quantization errors which is sometimes modeled as an additive random signal called quantization noise because of its behavior. The more levels a quantizer uses, the lower is its quantization noise power.

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