Scalable Non-Binary Distributed Source Coding Using Gray Codes

In this paper we propose a bit-plane based, scalable distributed source coding (DSC) scheme for non-binary correlated sources. In the source coding part of DSC, the symbols are quantized and the quantization indices are converted into binary forms using Gray codes. The channel coding part encodes each bit-plane independently using turbo codes. The turbo decoder that works in binary domain is facilitated by an outer loop that captures the symbol-domain correlation. Simulation results show that, in asymmetric DSC of joint Gaussian sources, the overall system performance is greatly improved by using Gray codes. It is also demonstrated that progressive transmission is well supported.