Distributed compression: Overview of current and emerging multimedia applications

Distributed compression or Distributed Source Coding (DSC) refers to separate compression and joint decompression of multiple correlated sources. Though theoretical foundations were set almost forty years ago, driven by applications such as wireless video surveillance and wireless multimedia communications, DSC has become and still is a very active research area with interest from both academia and industry. While the first decade of this century has seen massive progress in code designs and achievable bounds, recent work is focussed on applications and solving practical DSC limitations such as large codeword size, accurate correlation estimation, etc. The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of the exciting trends and novel applications such as security, remote sensing, wireless data gathering of correlated data, biomedical imaging and infotainment, that DSC makes possible.