We present a new lossy compressor for discrete-valued sources. For coding a
sequence xn, the encoder starts by assigning a certain cost to each possible
reconstruction sequence. It then finds the one that minimizes this cost and
describes it losslessly to the decoder via a universal lossless compressor. The
cost of each sequence is a linear combination of its distance from the sequence
xn and a linear function of its kth order empirical distribution.
The structure of the cost function allows the encoder to employ the Viterbi
algorithm to recover the minimizer of the cost. We identify a choice of the
coefficients comprising the linear function of the empirical distribution used
in the cost function which ensures that the algorithm universally achieves the
optimum rate-distortion performance of any stationary ergodic source in the
limit of large n, provided that k diverges as o(logn). Iterative
techniques for approximating the coefficients, which alleviate the
computational burden of finding the optimal coefficients, are proposed and
studied.Comment: 26 pages, 6 figures, Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information
Theor