Approximating Rate-Distortion Graphs of Individual Data: Experiments in Lossy Compression and Denoising

  • Authors:
  • Steven de Rooij;Paul Vitanyi

  • Affiliations:
  • Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam;Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Computers
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Classical rate-distortion theory requires specifying a source distribution. Instead, we analyze rate-distortion properties of individual objects using the recently developed algorithmic rate-distortion theory. The latter is based on the noncomputable notion of Kolmogorov complexity. To apply the theory we approximate the Kolmogorov complexity by standard data compression techniques, and perform a number of experiments with lossy compression and denoising of objects from different domains. We also introduce a natural generalization to lossy compression with side information. To maintain full generality we need to address a difficult searching problem. While our solutions are therefore not time efficient, we do observe good denoising and compression performance.