Zero-Delay and Causal Single-User and Multi-User Lossy Source Coding with Decoder Side Information

TL;DR

This paper investigates zero-delay causal source coding with decoder side information, showing optimal strategies involve simple scalar encoders and decoders, and characterizing the rate-distortion region for multi-user scenarios.

Contribution

It characterizes the optimal zero-delay coding strategies, demonstrates the limitations of causal encoding, and solves the multi-terminal rate-distortion problem in the zero-delay setting.

Findings

Optimal performance achieved by time sharing two scalar encoder-decoder pairs.

Side information lookahead is ineffective in the zero-delay setting.

Multi-terminal source coding rate-distortion region is explicitly characterized.

Abstract

We consider zero-delay single-user and multi-user source coding with average distortion constraint and decoder side information. The zero-delay constraint translates into causal (sequential) encoder and decoder pairs as well as the use of instantaneous codes. For the single-user setting, we show that optimal performance is attained by time sharing at most two scalar encoder-decoder pairs, that use zero-error side information codes. Side information lookahead is shown to useless in this setting. We show that the restriction to causal encoding functions is the one that causes the performance degradation, compared to unrestricted systems, and not the sequential decoders or instantaneous codes. Furthermore, we show that even without delay constraints, if either the encoder or decoder are restricted a-priori to be scalar, the performance loss cannot be compensated by the other component, which can be scalar as well without further loss. Finally, we show that the multi-terminal source coding problem can be solved in the zero-delay regime and the rate-distortion region is given.