Summary form only given. The distortion of matching pursuit is expressed in terms of MP encoder parameters for uniformly distributed signals and dictionaries. Under certain conditions, the distortion caused by matching pursuit decomposition of the signal can be calculated in terms of the norm of the signal, signal dimension, dictionary size, and the number of matching pursuit stages. The distortion caused by quantization of inner product coefficients can be calculated in terms of the number of quantization levels and the norm of the signal assuming the coefficients are uniformly distributed in the range of the quantizer. The distortion of the matching pursuit for random signals and dictionaries was accurately predicted based on simulation results. The optimized matching pursuit encoder shows optimum performance for non-uniform signal and dictionary distributions.