An algorithm for source coding subject to a fidelity criterion, based on string matching

A practical suboptimal universal block source coding scheme, subject to a fidelity criterion, is proposed. The algorithm is an extension of the Lempel-Ziv algorithm and is based on string matching with distortion. It is shown that given average distortion D>0, the algorithm achieves a rate of exceeding R( D/2) for a large class of sources and distortion measures. Tighter bounds on the rate are derived for discrete memoryless sources and for memoryless Gaussian sources