Statistical mechanical approach to lossy data compression: Theory and practice

The encoder and decoder for lossy data compression of binary memoryless sources are developed on the basis of a specific-type nonmonotonic perceptron. Statistical mechanical analysis indicates that the potential ability of the perceptron-based code saturates the theoretically achievable limit in most cases although exactly performing the compression is computationally difficult. To resolve this difficulty, we provide a computationally tractable approximation algorithm using belief propagation (BP), which is a current standard algorithm of probabilistic inference. Introducing several approximations and heuristics, the BP-based algorithm exhibits performance that is close to the achievable limit in a practical time scale in optimal cases.