A Sampling-based Distributed Source Coding Scheme

Abstract

In many practical distributed source coding (DSC) schemes that apply channel coding and iterative decoding, correlation estimation provides the likelihood information about the source bits to initialize the decoding algorithms. Therefore, the decoding depends strongly on the accuracy of this correlation estimation information. In this study, a sampling-based scheme for DSC is proposed that takes advantage of the source redundancy without requiring prior knowledge of its statistics. At the sender, the source sequence is sampled to obtain the sampled and unsampled sub-sequences. Then, the un-sampled sub-sequence is compressed by an arithmetic coder. Meanwhile the syndromes of the sampled sub-sequence are also calculated. At the receiver, the correlation between the side information and the un-sampled sub-sequence is used to estimate the conditional marginal distribution of the sampled sub-sequence. Then, the estimated information is used to initialize the likelihood information of the decoding algorithms. Finally, the likelihood information is combined with the received syndromes to perform iterative decoding to recover the original sampled sub-sequence. Experiment results show that the proposed scheme achieves better rate-distortion performance compared with the existing DSC schemes.