On the Bee-Identification Error Exponent with Absentee Bees

TL;DR

This paper extends the bee-identification error exponent analysis to scenarios with absentee bees, showing that independent decoding remains optimal and defining the capacity for this setting.

Contribution

It provides an exact characterization of the error exponent with absentee bees and proves the optimality of independent barcode decoding in this context.

Findings

Independent barcode decoding is optimal with absentee bees.

The error exponent with absentee bees is characterized exactly.

The capacity for bee identification with absentee bees is defined and the strong converse is proved.

Abstract

The "bee-identification problem" was formally defined by Tandon, Tan and Varshney [IEEE Trans. Commun. (2019) [Online early access]], and the error exponent was studied. This work extends the results for the "absentee bees" scenario, where a small fraction of the bees are absent in the beehive image used for identification. For this setting, we present an exact characterization of the bee-identification error exponent, and show that independent barcode decoding is optimal, i.e., joint decoding of the bee barcodes does not result in a better error exponent relative to independent decoding of each noisy barcode. This is in contrast to the result without absentee bees, where joint barcode decoding results in a significantly higher error exponent than independent barcode decoding. We also define and characterize the "capacity" for the bee-identification problem with absentee bees, and prove the strong converse for the same.