Lossy source coding with Gaussian or erased side-information

In this paper we find properties that are shared between two seemingly unrelated lossy source coding setups with side-information. The first setup is when the source and side-information are jointly Gaussian and the distortion measure is quadratic. The second setup is when the side-information is an erased version of the source. We begin with the observation that in both these cases the Wyner-Ziv and conditional rate-distortion functions are equal. We further find that there is a continuum of optimal strategies for the conditional rate distortion problem in both these setups. Next, we consider the case when there are two decoders with access to different side-information sources. For the case when the encoder has access to the side-information we establish bounds on the rate-distortion function and a sufficient condition for tightness. Under this condition, we find a characterization of the rate-distortion function for physically degraded side-information. This characterization holds for both the Gaussian and erasure setups.