Robust multiresolution coding with Hamming distortion measure

In multiresolution coding a source sequence is encoded into a base layer and a refinement layer. The refinement layer, constructed using a conditional codebook, is in general not decodable without the correct reception of the base layer. By relating multiresolution coding with multiple description coding, we show that it is in fact possible to construct multiresolution codes in certain ways so that the refinement layer alone can be used to reconstruct the source to achieve a nontrivial distortion. As a consequence, one can improve the robustness of the existing multiresolution coding schemes without sacrificing the efficiency. Specifically, we obtain an explicit expression of the minimum distortion achievable by the refinement layer for arbitrary finite alphabet sources with Hamming distortion measure. Experimental results show that the information-theoretic limits can be approached using practical robust multiresolution coding schemes based on low-density generator matrix codes.