On the rate-distortion region for multiple descriptions

  • Authors:
  • Fang-Wei Fu;R. W. Yeung

  • Affiliations:
  • Temasek Labs., Nat. Univ. of Singapore;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

We study the problem of source coding with multiple descriptions, which is described as follows. Let X be a discrete memoryless source. There are two encoders, Encoders 1 and 2, and three decoders, Decoders 0, 1, and 2. Encoders 1 and 2 describe the source X at respective rates R1 and R2. Decoder 1 receives the output of Encoder 1 only, and it can recover X with distortion D1. Decoder 2 receives the output of Encoder 2 only, and it can recover X with distortion D2. Decoder 0 receives the outputs of both Encoders 1 and 2, and it can recover X with distortion D0. We show that if Decoder 2 (or Decoder 1) is required to recover a function of the source X perfectly in the usual Shannon sense, the El Gamal-Cover (1982) inner bound on the rate distortion region is tight. This finding subsumes the Rimoldi (1994) rate-distortion region for successive refinement of information, the Kaspi (1994) rate-distortion function when side information may be present at the decoder, and the El Gamal-Cover achievable rate region for multiple descriptions with deterministic distortion measures. We have also obtained a new outer bound on the rate-distortion region which enhances the outer bound due to Witsenhausen (1981) and Wyner. This new outer bound implies some interesting facts regarding the achievable rate-distortion vectors. Finally, we pose a multilevel diversity source coding problem for further study