ON THE BIT DISTRIBUTION IN ASYMMETRIC MULTIPLE-DESCRIPTION CODING

摘要

It has recently been shown that for asymmetric multiple-description lattice vector quantizers, given a fixed total bit budget, the optimal bit distribution among the descriptions is not unique but contains in fact a set of solutions, which all lead to minimal expected distortion. Contrary to ones intuition, this result indicates that distributing the bit budget such that most bits are transmitted on the bad channels yields equivalent performance as if most bits are transmitted on the good channels. In the present work we study some peculiar consequences of this result. Specifically, we consider minimization of an economical cost in addition to minimizing the expected distortion subject to a maximum bit budget. We also consider the related problem of minimizing the expected distortion subject to a maximum economical cost.