An Implementable Scheme for Universal Lossy Compression of Discrete Markov Sources

  • Authors:
  • Shirin Jalali;Andrea Montanari;Tsachy Weissman

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • DCC '09 Proceedings of the 2009 Data Compression Conference
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

We present a new lossy compressor for discrete sources. For coding a source sequence $x^n$, the encoder starts by assigning a certain cost to each reconstruction sequence. It then finds the reconstruction that minimizes this cost and describes it losslessly to the decoder via a universal lossless compressor. The cost of a sequence is given by a linear combination of its empirical probabilities of some order $k+1$ and its distortion relative to the source sequence. The linear structure of the cost in the empirical count matrix allows the encoder to employ a Viterbi-like algorithm for obtaining the minimizing reconstruction sequence simply. We identify a choice of coefficients for the linear combination in the cost function which ensures that the algorithm universally achieves the optimum rate-distortion performance of any Markov source in the limit of large $n$, provided $k$ is increased as $o(\log n)$.