An Information-Spectrum Approach to Multiterminal Rate-Distortion Theory

An information-spectrum approach is applied to solve the multiterminal source coding problem for correlated general sources, where sources may be nonstationary and/or nonergodic, and the distortion measure is arbitrary and may be nonadditive. A general formula for the rate-distortion region of the multiterminal source coding problem with the maximum distortion criterion under fixed-length coding is shown in this correspondence. Index Terms Correlated general sources, information spectrum, multiterminal source coding, rate-distortion region, side information. This work was supported in part by the Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant NSFC-60472079 and by the Chinese Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education under Grant 2004-0335099. S. Yang and P. Qiu are with the Department of Information Science & Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China(email: [email protected]; [email protected]). SUBMITTED TO IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY FOR PEER REVIEW (APRIL 28, 2006) 1 An Information-Spectrum Approach to Multiterminal Rate-Distortion Theory