A Universal Wyner-Ziv Scheme for Discrete Sources

We consider the Wyner-Ziv (WZ) problem of rate- distortion coding with decoder side information, for the case where the source statistics are unknown or non-existent. A new family of WZ coding algorithms is proposed and its universal optimality is proven. Encoding is based on a sliding window operation followed by LZ compression, while decoding is based on a natural extension of the Discrete Universal DEnoiser (DUDE) algorithm to the case where side information is present. The effectiveness of our approach is illustrated with experiments on binary images using a low complexity algorithm motivated by our class of universally optimal WZ codes.