Polar Codes for Distributed Hierarchical Source Coding

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that polar codes can effectively achieve the rate-distortion limits in hierarchical and distributed source coding scenarios, including successive refinement with side information.

Contribution

It introduces polar coding schemes that attain optimal rate-distortion functions in hierarchical and distributed source coding with side information.

Findings

Polar codes achieve the rate-distortion bounds in hierarchical source coding.

The paper constructs polar coding schemes for distributed successive refinement.

Achieves optimal performance with side information in distributed settings.

Abstract

We show that polar codes can be used to achieve the rate-distortion functions in the problem of hierarchical source coding also known as the successive refinement problem. We also analyze the distributed version of this problem, constructing a polar coding scheme that achieves the rate distortion functions for successive refinement with side information.