Rate-Distortion Function for a Heegard-Berger Problem With Two Sources and Degraded Reconstruction Sets

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate an instance of the Heegard–Berger problem with two sources and arbitrarily correlated side information sequences at two decoders, in which the reconstruction sets at the decoders are degraded. Specifically, two sources are to be encoded in a manner that one of the two is reproduced losslessly by both the decoders, and the other is reproduced within some prescribed distortion level at one of the two decoders. We establish a single-letter characterization of the rate-distortion function for this model. In particular, we show that the optimal coding scheme for this setting is one in which the common description to be recovered by both the decoders should allow to involve all or part of the source that is to be reproduced at only one decoder. Furthermore, we also generalize our result to the setting in which the source component that is to be recovered by both users is reconstructed in a lossy fashion, under the requirement that all terminals (i.e., the encoder and both the decoders) can share an exact copy of the compressed version of this source component, i.e., a common encoder–decoder reconstruction constraint. For this model as well, we establish a single-letter characterization of the associated rate-distortion function.