<tex>$n$</tex>-Channel Symmetric Multiple Descriptions—Part II: An Achievable Rate-Distortion Region

Abstract

In this Part II of a two-part paper, we present a new achievable rate-distortion region for the symmetric n-channel multiple-descriptions coding problem (n>2) where the rate of every description is the same, and the reconstruction distortion depends only on the number of descriptions received. Using a new approach for the random coding constructions, along with a generalization of the technique used in the two-channel El Gamal and Cover region to any n, the rate region presented here achieves points that have not been known in the literature previously. This rate region is derived from a concatenation of source-channel erasure codes developed in Part I of this work by deploying the framework of source coding with side information ("random binning"). The key idea is that by using the framework of source coding with side information, multiple statistically identical realizations representing the coarse version of a source can be simultaneously refined by a single encoding. We point out that there is an important conceptual difference in random coding construction for the multiple-descriptions coding problem between the case of n=2 and n>2. To illustrate the framework, we also present the important case of the Gaussian source in detail.