what is DPCM. advantage and disadvantage of DPCM.

Differential pulse-code modulation

INTRODUCTION

Differential pulse-code modulation (DPCM) is a signal encoder that uses the baseline of pulse-code modulation (PCM) but adds some functionalities based on the prediction of the samples of the signal. The input can be an analog signal or a digital signal.

If the input is a continuous-time analog signal, it needs to be sampled first so that a discrete-time signal is the input to the DPCM encoder.

Option 1: take the values of two consecutive samples; if they are analog samples, quantize them; calculate the difference between the first one and the next; the output is the difference, and it can be further entropy coded.
Option 2: instead of taking a difference relative to a previous input sample, take the difference relative to the output of a local model of the decoder process; in this option, the difference can be quantized, which allows a good way to incorporate a controlled loss in the encoding.
Applying one of these two processes, short-term redundancy (positive correlation of nearby values) of the signal is eliminated; compression ratios on the order of 2 to 4 can be achieved if differences are subsequently entropy coded, because the entropy of the difference signal is much smaller than that of the original discrete signal treated as independent samples.



What is DPCM?

Differential pulse code modulation (DPCM) is a procedure of converting an analog into a digital signal in which an analog signal is sampled and then the difference between the actual sample value and its predicted value (predicted value is based on previous sample or samples) is quantized and then encoded forming a digital value.

DPCM code words represent differences between samples unlike PCM where code words represented a sample value.

Basic concept of DPCM - coding a difference, is based on the fact that most source signals show significant correlation between successive samples so encoding uses redundancy in sample values which implies lower bit rate.

Realization of basic concept (described above) is based on a technique in which we have to predict current sample value based upon previous samples (or sample) and we have to encode the difference between actual value of sample and predicted value (the difference between samples can be interpreted as prediction error).
Because it's necessary to predict sample value DPCM is form of predictive coding.

DPCM compression depends on the prediction technique, well-conducted prediction techniques lead to good compression rates, in other cases DPCM could mean expansion comparing to regular PCM encoding.

Differential pulse-code modulation (DPCM) is a signal encoder that uses the baseline of pulse-code modulation (PCM) but adds some functionalities based on the prediction of the samples of the signal. The input can be an analog signal or a digital signal.

If the input is a continuous-time analog signal, it needs to be sampled first so that a discrete-time signal is the input to the DPCM encoder.

Option 1: take the values of two consecutive samples; if they are analog samples, quantize them; calculate the difference between the first one and the next; the output is the difference, and it can be further entropy coded.
Option 2: instead of taking a difference relative to a previous input sample, take the difference relative to the output of a local model of the decoder process; in this option, the difference can be quantized, which allows a good way to incorporate a controlled loss in the encoding.
Applying one of these two processes, short-term redundancy (positive correlation of nearby values) of the signal is eliminated; compression ratios on the order of 2 to 4 can be achieved if differences are subsequently entropy coded, because the entropy of the difference signal is much smaller than that of the original discrete signal treated as independent samples.