5 research outputs found
Incremental Refinements and Multiple Descriptions with Feedback
It is well known that independent (separate) encoding of K correlated sources
may incur some rate loss compared to joint encoding, even if the decoding is
done jointly. This loss is particularly evident in the multiple descriptions
problem, where the sources are repetitions of the same source, but each
description must be individually good. We observe that under mild conditions
about the source and distortion measure, the rate ratio Rindependent(K)/Rjoint
goes to one in the limit of small rate/high distortion. Moreover, we consider
the excess rate with respect to the rate-distortion function, Rindependent(K,
M) - R(D), in M rounds of K independent encodings with a final distortion level
D. We provide two examples - a Gaussian source with mean-squared error and an
exponential source with one-sided error - for which the excess rate vanishes in
the limit as the number of rounds M goes to infinity, for any fixed D and K.
This result has an interesting interpretation for a multi-round variant of the
multiple descriptions problem, where after each round the encoder gets a
(block) feedback regarding which of the descriptions arrived: In the limit as
the number of rounds M goes to infinity (i.e., many incremental rounds), the
total rate of received descriptions approaches the rate-distortion function. We
provide theoretical and experimental evidence showing that this phenomenon is
in fact more general than in the two examples above.Comment: 62 pages. Accepted in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theor