A Global Approach to Joint Quantizer Design for Distributed Coding of Correlated Sources

The focus of this work is on the design of efficient quantizers for correlated sources subject to complexity limitations on the encoding terminals. Existing iterative descent methods rely heavily on initialization, and the prevalence of numerous 'poor' local optima strongly motivates the use of a global design algorithm. We propose a multiple-prototype based deterministic annealing approach for the joint design of all components of a generic distributed source coding system. Our approach avoids many poor local optima, is independent of initialization and does not assume any prior information on the underlying source distribution. Simulation results show substantial gains over a Lloyd-like iterative algorithm