On the Multiterminal Rate-Distortion Function for Acoustic Sensing

We consider the rate-distortion problem for recording a Gaussian acoustic field with an array of sensors equipped with microphones. Our analysis is based on the field's spatio-temporal correlation structure, which is induced by the physics of sound propagation. Under certain assumptions about the spectrum of the wave kernel, we determine the rate-distortion functions for various distributed source coding schemes and sampling lattices. Our results also include an answer to the multiterminal rate-distortion problem for the setup considered in the paper