where
ˆx(n
) is the estimate of
x
(
n
) at discrete time instant
n
, and {
a
k
} is the predictor weight.
2
The samples
of the estimation error sequence,
e
(
n
) =
x
(
n
) –
ˆx
(
n
) are less correlated with each other compared to the
original signal,
x
(
n
) as the predictor removes the unnecessary information which is the predictable
portion of the sample
x
(
n
). In a typical DPCM encoder, the error sequence is quantized by using a
nonuniform quantizer and quantizer outputs are entropy coded by assigning variable-length codewords
to the quantized error sequence according to the frequency of occurrence. The variable length codebook
is constructed by Huffman coding which assigns shorter (longer) codewords to values occurring with
higher (lower) probabilities. Huffman coding produces compression results that are arbitrarily close to
the entropy of the quantized error sequence.
A CR of 7.8 was reported for an ECG signal recorded at a rate of 500 Hz with 8 bit/sample resolution
[6]. This means that about 1 bit/sample is used to represent the ECG signal. The corresponding Percent
Root Mean Square Difference (PRD) was 3.5. The PRD is a measure of reconstruction error and it is
defined as follows: