This paper considers the problem of variable-length lossy source coding. The performance criteria are the excess distortion probability and the cumulant generating function of codeword lengths. We derive a non-asymptotic fundamental limit of the cumulant generating function of codeword lengths allowing positive excess distortion probability. It is shown that the achievability and converse bounds are characterized by the Rényi entropy-based quantity. In the proof of the achievability result, the explicit code construction is provided. Further, we investigate an asymptotic single-letter characterization of the fundamental limit for a stationary memoryless source.
We consider universal variable-to-fixed length compression of memoryless sources with a fidelity criterion. We design a dictionary codebook over the reproduction alphabet which is used to parse the source stream. Once a source subsequence is within a specified distortion of a dictionary codeword, the index of the codeword is emitted as the reproduced string. Our proposed dictionary consists of coverings of type classes in the boundary of transition from low to high empirical lossy rate. We derive the asymptotics of the ε-coding rate (up to the third-order term) of our coding scheme for large e…
We describe message-passing and decimation approaches for lossy source coding using low-density generator matrix (LDGM) codes. In particular, this paper addresses the problem of encoding a Bernoulli(0.5) source: for randomly generated LDGM codes with suitably irregular degree distributions, our methods yield performance very close to the rate distortion limit over a range of rates. Our approach is inspired by the survey propagation (SP) algorithm, originally developed by Mezard et al. for solving random satisfiability problems. Previous work by Maneva et al. shows how SP can be understood as b…
We consider a variant of the channel simulation problem with a single input and multiple outputs, where Alice observes a probability distribution $P$ from a set of prescribed probability distributions $\mathbb{\mathcal{P}}$, and sends a prefix-free codeword $W$ to Bob to allow him to generate $n$ i.i.d. random variables $X_{1},X_{2,}...,X_{n}$ which follow the distribution $P$. This can also be regarded as a lossy compression setting for probability distributions. This paper describes encoding schemes for three cases of $P$: $P$ is a distribution over positive integers, $P$ is a continuous dis…
A lossy source code $\mathcal{C}$ with rate $R$ for a discrete memoryless source $S$ is called subset-universal if for every $0<R'< R$, almost every subset of $2^{nR'}$ of its codewords achieves average distortion close to the source's distortion-rate function $D(R')$. In this paper we prove the asymptotic existence of such codes. Moreover, we show the asymptotic existence of a code that is subset-universal with respect to all sources with the same alphabet.
In this paper, we study the use of GF(q)-quantized LDGM codes for binary source coding. By employing quantization, it is possible to obtain binary codewords with a non-uniform distribution. The obtained statistics is hence suitable for optimal, direct quantization of non-uniform Bernoulli sources. We employ a message-passing algorithm combined with a decimation procedure in order to perform compression. The experimental results based on GF(q)-LDGM codes with regular degree distributions yield performances quite close to the theoretical rate-distortion bounds.
Motivated by applications of biometric identification and content identification systems, we consider the problem of random coding for channels, where each codeword undergoes lossy compression (vector quantization), and where the decoder bases its decision only on the compressed codewords and the channel output, which is in turn, the channel's response to the transmission of an original codeword, before compression. For memoryless sources and memoryless channels with finite alphabets, we propose a new universal decoder and analyze its error exponent, which improves on an earlier result by Dasa…
This paper investigates the problem of variable-length lossy source coding allowing a positive excess distortion probability and an overflow probability of codeword lengths. Novel one-shot achievability and converse bounds of the optimal rate are established by a new quantity based on the smooth max entropy (the smooth Rényi entropy of order zero). To derive the achievability bounds, we give an explicit code construction based on a distortion ball instead of using the random coding argument. The basic idea of the code construction is similar to the optimal code construction in the variable-len…
We propose a universal ensemble for random selection of rate-distortion codes, which is asymptotically optimal in a sample-wise sense. According to this ensemble, each reproduction vector, $\hbx$, is selected independently at random under the probability distribution that is proportional to $2^{-LZ(\hbx)}$, where $LZ(\hbx)$ is the code-length of $\hbx$ pertaining to the 1978 version of the Lempel-Ziv (LZ) algorithm. We show that, with high probability, the resulting codebook gives rise to an asymptotically optimal variable-rate lossy compression scheme under an arbitrary distortion measure, in…
We study the problem of lossy joint source-channel coding in a single-user energy harvesting communication system with causal energy arrivals and the energy storage unit may have leakage. In particular, we investigate the achievable distortion in the transmission of a single source via an energy harvesting transmitter over a point-to-point channel. We consider an adaptive joint source-channel coding system, where the length of channel codewords varies based on the available battery charge. We first establish a lower bound on the achievable distortion. Then, as necessary conditions for local op…
This paper finds new tight finite-blocklength bounds for the best achievable lossy joint source-channel code rate, and demonstrates that joint source-channel code design brings considerable performance advantage over a separate one in the non-asymptotic regime. A joint source-channel code maps a block of $k$ source symbols onto a length$-n$ channel codeword, and the fidelity of reproduction at the receiver end is measured by the probability $ε$ that the distortion exceeds a given threshold $d$. For memoryless sources and channels, it is demonstrated that the parameters of the best joint source…
This paper provides upper and lower bounds on the optimal guessing moments of a random variable taking values on a finite set when side information may be available. These moments quantify the number of guesses required for correctly identifying the unknown object and, similarly to Arikan's bounds, they are expressed in terms of the Arimoto-Rényi conditional entropy. Although Arikan's bounds are asymptotically tight, the improvement of the bounds in this paper is significant in the non-asymptotic regime. Relationships between moments of the optimal guessing function and the MAP error probabili…
We study the problem of designing optical receivers to discriminate between multiple coherent states using coherent processing receivers---i.e., one that uses arbitrary coherent feedback control and quantum-noise-limited direct detection---which was shown by Dolinar to achieve the minimum error probability in discriminating any two coherent states. We first derive and re-interpret Dolinar's binary-hypothesis minimum-probability-of-error receiver as the one that optimizes the information efficiency at each time instant, based on recursive Bayesian updates within the receiver. Using this viewpoi…
We introduce a universal quantization scheme based on random coding, and we analyze its performance. This scheme consists of a source-independent random codebook (typically_mismatched_ to the source distribution), followed by optimal entropy-coding that is_matched_ to the quantized codeword distribution. A single-letter formula is derived for the rate achieved by this scheme at a given distortion, in the limit of large codebook dimension. The rate reduction due to entropy-coding is quantified, and it is shown that it can be arbitrarily large. In the special case of "almost uniform" codebooks (…
We propose computationally efficient encoders and decoders for lossy compression using a Sparse Regression Code. The codebook is defined by a design matrix and codewords are structured linear combinations of columns of this matrix. The proposed encoding algorithm sequentially chooses columns of the design matrix to successively approximate the source sequence. It is shown to achieve the optimal distortion-rate function for i.i.d Gaussian sources under the squared-error distortion criterion. For a given rate, the parameters of the design matrix can be varied to trade off distortion performance …
We study a new class of codes for lossy compression with the squared-error distortion criterion, designed using the statistical framework of high-dimensional linear regression. Codewords are linear combinations of subsets of columns of a design matrix. Called a Sparse Superposition or Sparse Regression codebook, this structure is motivated by an analogous construction proposed recently by Barron and Joseph for communication over an AWGN channel. For i.i.d Gaussian sources and minimum-distance encoding, we show that such a code can attain the Shannon rate-distortion function with the optimal er…
This work is devoted to practical joint source channel coding. Although the proposed approach has more general scope, for the sake of clarity we focus on a specific application example, namely, the transmission of digital images over noisy binary-input output-symmetric channels. The basic building blocks of most state-of the art source coders are: 1) a linear transformation; 2) scalar quantization of the transform coefficients; 3) probability modeling of the sequence of quantization indices; 4) an entropy coding stage. We identify the weakness of the conventional separated source-channel codin…
We prove the existence of codebooks for d-semifaithful lossy compression that are simultaneously universal with respect to both the class of finite-alphabet memoryless sources and the class of all bounded additive distortion measures. By applying independent random selection of the codewords according to a mixture of all memoryless sources, we achieve redundancy rates that are within O(log n/n) close to the empirical rate-distortion function of every given source vector with respect to every bounded distortion measure. As outlined in the last section, the principal ideas can also be extended s…
An effective 'on-the-fly' mechanism for stochastic lossy coding of Markov sources using string matching techniques is proposed in this paper. Earlier work has shown that the rate-distortion bound can be asymptotically achieved by a 'natural type selection' (NTS) mechanism which iteratively encodes asymptotically long source strings (from an unknown source distribution P) and regenerates the codebook according to a maximum likelihood distribution framework, after observing a set of K codewords to 'd-match' (i.e., satisfy the distortion constraint for) a respective set of K source words. This re…
This paper studies the performance of sparse regression codes for lossy compression with the squared-error distortion criterion. In a sparse regression code, codewords are linear combinations of subsets of columns of a design matrix. It is shown that with minimum-distance encoding, sparse regression codes achieve the Shannon rate-distortion function for i.i.d. Gaussian sources $R^*(D)$ as well as the optimal excess-distortion exponent. This completes a previous result which showed that $R^*(D)$ and the optimal exponent were achievable for distortions below a certain threshold. The proof of the…