Analog Multiple Descriptions: A Zero-Delay Source-Channel Coding Approach

Abstract: This paper extends the well-known source coding problem of multiple descriptions, in its general and basic setting, to analog source-channel coding scenarios. Encoding-decoding functions that optimally map between the (possibly continuous valued) source and the channel spaces are numerically derived. The main technical tool is a non-convex optimization method, namely, deterministic annealing, which has recently been successfully used in other mapping optimization problems. The obtained functions exhibit several interesting structural properties, map multiple source intervals to the same interval in the channel space, and consistently outperform the known competing mapping techniques.