Source Description Cost

The paper considers the source description problem with average distortion and per-symbol reproduction cost constraints. The source description cost-distortion function is then defined as the minimum of a weighted sum of the rate and the expected per-symbol reproduction cost subject to average distortion constraint. This function is evaluated for (i) binary source, Hamming loss and reproduction cost of 0 for a 0 and 1 for 1, (ii) Gaussian source, squared error distortion, and average power constraint on reproduction, and (iii) Gaussian Wyner-Ziv source coding with side information setting and average power constraint on reproduction. The results are compared to the description cost in the classical case