Multiterminal Source Coding with High Resolution

We consider separate encoding and joint decoding of correlated continuous information sources, subject to a difference distortion measure. We first derive a multiterminal extension of the Shannon lower bound for the rate region. Then we show that this Shannon outer bound is asymptotically tight for small distortions. These results imply that the loss in the sum of the coding rates due to the separation of the encoders vanishes in the limit of high resolution. Furthermore, lattice quantizers followed by Slepian–Wolf lossless encoding are asymptotically optimal. We also investigate the high-resolution rate region in the remote coding case, where the encoders observe only noisy versions of the sources. For the quadratic Gaussian case, we establish a separation result to the effect that multiterminal coding aimed at reconstructing the noisy sources subject to the rate constraints, followed by estimation of the remote sources from these reconstructions, is optimal under certain regularity conditions on the structure of the coding scheme.