On the Rate-Distortion Function for Binary Source Coding With Side Information

Abstract

We present an in-depth analysis of the problem of lossy compression of binary sources in the presence of correlated side information, where the correlation is given by a generic binary asymmetric channel and the Hamming distance is the distortion metric. Our analysis is motivated by systematic rate-distortion gains observed when applying asymmetric correlation models in Wyner-Ziv video coding. First, we derive for the first time the rate-distortion function for conventional predictive coding in the binary-asymmetric-correlation-channel scenario. Second, we propose a new bound for the case where the side information is only available at the decoder—Wyner-Ziv coding. We conjecture this bound to be tight. We show that the maximum rate needed to encode as well as the maximum rate-loss of Wyner-Ziv coding relative to predictive coding corresponds to uniform sources and symmetric correlations. Importantly, we show that the upper bound on the rate-loss established by Zamir is not tight and that the maximum value is actually significantly lower. Moreover, we prove that the only binary correlation channel that incurs no rate-loss for Wyner-Ziv coding compared with predictive coding is the Z-channel. Finally, we complement our analysis with new compression performance results obtained with our state-of-the-art Wyner-Ziv video coding system.