Abstract Vector Quantization (VQ) is a clustering problem in the fields of signal processing, source coding, information theory etc. Taking advantage of recent advances in the field of deep neural networks, this paper investigates the performance between VQ clustering problems and deep neural networks. A k ‐means‐based deep network architecture for VQ is presented to solve clustering problems. By applying the deep learning implementation of convergence optimization, a clustering neural network (algorithm) for the …