qsn has been normalized to the most significant bit of the bit depth of the digital symbols as a result the effect of a given qp is essentially independent of bit depth a particular qp value has a standard effect on image quality regardless of bit depth the invention is useful for example in encoding and decoding at different bit depths to generate compatible bitstreams having different bit depths and to allow different bit depths for different components of a video signal by compressing each with the same fidelity application_number US 201715625192 A description in a preferred embodiment a quantization parameter qp determines the quantization step size qs in order to achieve qp invariance as bit depth changes it is necessary to normalize qs with respect to the most significant bit of the input data sample bit depth if a given qp maps to a quantization step size qs 8 for 8 bit samples then the resulting quantization step size for n bit samples is note that the implementation of these changes simply requires additional shift operations with respect to the operations on 8 bit data although equations 7 through 11 may be expressed more generally they are expressed with respect to an 8 bit reference because 8 bit bit depths have been common heretofore fig6 shows schematically a generic quantization and dequantization system in accordance with aspects of the present invention the quantization parameter qp is applied to a first mapping function 22 that generates a quantization step size qs n in accordance with predetermined qp to qs mapping relationships and a bit depth n the quantization step size qs n is determined.