The rate-distortion function for successive refinement of abstract sources

Abstract

In successive refinement of information, the decoder refines its representation of the source progressively as it receives more encoded bits. The rate-distortion region of successive refinement describes the minimum rates required to attain the target distortions at each decoding stage. In this paper, we derive a parametric characterization of the rate-distortion region for successive refinement of abstract sources. Our characterization extends Csiszar's result [1] to successive refinement, and generalizes a result by Tuncel and Rose [2], applicable for finite alphabet sources, to abstract sources. The new characterization leads to a family of outer bounds to the rate-distortion region. It also enables new nonasymptotic converse bounds.

Files

Additional details