A Lego- Brick Approach to Lossy Source Coding

Coding schemes for the lossy source coding problem are developed starting from point-to-point channel codes that are designed for symmetric channels. Bounds on the attained average distortion of the coding schemes are derived in terms of the parameters of the point-to-point channel codes. Assuming that the constituent channel codes satisfy some properties on the rate, the error probability and the input-output distribution of the decoding functions, the performance guarantees hold irrespective of other properties of the codes. Moreover, it is shown that the proposed coding schemes achieve the rate-distortion bound, provided that the constituent codes are rate-optimal. This would allow one to leverage commercial off-the-shelf codes for point-to-point symmetric channels in the practical implementation of lossy source codes.