title: What is vector quantization using k-means?
body: <p>First of all, can someone explain what vector quantization is, its purpose, and what it does? Secondly, an explanation of how k-means is used to do this would be appreciated as well. </p>
  
  <p>For the record, I don't know if this will make a difference in the explanation, but I'm trying to learn about vector quantization in the context of boundary descriptors. If I calculated a number of boundary descriptors for a particular segment in an image, and I wanted to vector quantize them using k-means, what would this mean, what would this do, why would I want to do, and how would I do it? </p>