Natural type selection in adaptive lossy compression

  • Authors:
  • R. Zamir;K. Rose

  • Affiliations:
  • Dept. of Electr. Eng.-Syst., Tel Aviv Univ.;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

Consider approximate (lossy) matching of a source string ~P, with a random codebook generated from reproduction distribution Q, at a specified distortion d. Previous work determined the minimum coding rate R1=R(P, Q, d) for this setting. We observe that for a large word length and with high probability, the matching codeword is typical with a distribution Q1 which is different from Q. If a new random codebook is generated ~Q1, then the source string will favor codewords which are typical with a new distribution Q2, resulting in a minimum coding rate R2=R(P, Q1, d), and so on. We show that the sequences of distributions Q1, Q 2,... and rates R1, R2,..., generated by this procedure, converge to an optimum reproduction distribution Q*, and the rate-distortion function R(P, d), respectively. We also derive a fixed rate-distortion slope version of this natural type selection process. In the latter case, an iteration of the process stochastically simulates an iteration of the Blahut-Arimoto (1972) algorithm for rate-distortion function computation (without recourse to prior knowledge of the underlying source distribution). To strengthen these limit statements, we also characterize the steady-state error of these procedures when iterating at a finite string length. Implications of the main results provide fresh insights into the workings of lossy variants of the Lempel-Ziv algorithm for adaptive compression