Analysis of Semilogarithmic Companding Quantization

In this paper, an analysis of semilogarithmic companding quantization of amplitudes having the Laplacian probability density function is performed. Particular attention is focused on studying quantizer robustness on changes in amplitude variance. In order to achieve better robustness of the quantizer in question, a method for its design is proposed, which provides the approximately equal quality of the quantized signal at the boundaries of the predefined variance range. The presented analysis and the obtained results can be useful in digital processing of speech and other non-stationary signals having wide amplitude dynamics.