In this work, we investigate an instance of the Heegard-Berger problem with
two sources and arbitrarily correlated side information sequences at two
decoders, in which the reconstruction sets at the decoders are degraded.
Specifically, two sources are to be encoded in a manner that one of the two is
reproduced losslessly by both decoders, and the other is reproduced to within
some prescribed distortion level at one of the two decoders. We establish a
single-letter characterization of the rate-distortion function for this model.
The investigation of this result in some special cases also sheds light on the
utility of joint compression of the two sources. Furthermore, we also
generalize our result to the setting in which the source component that is to
be recovered by both users is reconstructed in a lossy fashion, under the
requirement that all terminals (i.e., the encoder and both decoders) can share
an exact copy of the compressed version of this source component, i.e., a
common encoder-decoders reconstruction constraint. For this model as well, we
establish a single-letter characterization of the associated rate-distortion
function.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Trans. on Information Theor