Critical behavior in lossy source coding

Abstract

The following critical phenomenon was recently discovered. When a memoryless source is compressed using a variable-length fixed-distortion code, the fastest convergence rate of the (pointwise) compression ratio to R(D) is either O(/spl radic/n) or O(log n). We show it is always O(/spl radic/n), except for discrete, uniformly distributed sources.

Locations

• arXiv (Cornell University) - View - PDF
• IEEE Transactions on Information Theory - View