Although vector quantization (VQ) is an established topic in communication, its practical utility has been limited due to (i) prohibitive complexity for higher quality and bit-rate, (ii) structured VQ methods which are not analyzed for optimum performance, (iii) difficulty of mapping theoretical performance of mean square error (MSE) to perceptual measures. However, an ever increasing demand for various source signal compression, points to VQ as the inevitable choice for high efficiency. This thesis addresses all the three above issues, utilizing the power of parametric stochastic modeling of the signal source, viz., Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and proposes new solutions. Addressing some of the new requirements of source coding in network applications, the thesis also presents solutions for scalable bit-rate, rate-independent complexity and decoder scalability. While structured VQ is a necessity to reduce the complexity, we have developed, analyzed and compared three different schemes of compensation for the loss due to structured VQ. Focusing on the widely used methods of split VQ (SVQ) and KLT based transform domain scalar quantization (TrSQ), we develop expressions for their optimum performance using high rate quantization theory. We propose the use of conditional PDF based SVQ (CSVQ) to compensate for the split loss in SVQ and analytically show that it achieves coding gain over SVQ. Using the analytical expressions of complexity, an algorithm to choose the optimum splits is proposed. We analyze these techniques for their complexity as well as perceptual distortion measure, considering the specific case of quantizing the wide band speech line spectrum frequency (LSF) parameters. Using natural speech data, it is shown that the new conditional PDF based methods provide better perceptual distortion performance than the traditional methods. Exploring the use of GMMs for the source, we take the approach of separately estimating the GMM parameters and then use the high rate quantization theory in a simplified manner to derive closed form expressions for optimum MSE performance. This has led to the development of non-linear prediction for compensating the split loss (in contrast to the linear prediction using a Gaussian model). We show that the GMM approach can improve the recently proposed adaptive VQ scheme of switched SVQ (SSVQ). We derive the optimum performance expressions for SSVQ, in both variable bit rate and fixed bit rate formats, using the simplified approach of GMM in high rate theory. As a third scheme for recovering the split loss in SVQ and reduce the complexity, we propose a two stage SVQ (TsSVQ), which is analyzed for minimum complexity as well as perceptual distortion. Utilizing the low complexity of transform domain SVQ (TrSVQ) as well as the two stage approach in a universal coding framework, it is shown that we can achieve low complexity as well as better performance than SSVQ. Further, the combination of GMM and universal coding led to the development of a highly scalable coder which can provide both bit-rate scalability, decoder scalability and rate-independent low complexity. Also, the perceptual distortion performance is comparable to that of SSVQ. Since GMM is a generic source model, we develop a new method of predicting the performance bound for perceptual distortion using VQ. Applying this method to LSF quantization, the minimum bit rates for quantizing telephone band LSF (TB-LSF) and wideband LSF (WB-LSF) are derived.