Design of optimal quantizers for distributed source coding

The problem of designing optimal quantizers for distributed source coding is addressed. The generality of this formulation includes both the symmetric and asymmetric scenarios, together with a number of coding schemes, such as ideal coding achieving a rate equal to the joint conditional entropy of the quantized sources given the side information. The paper shows the optimality conditions that quantizers must satisfy, and generalizes the Lloyd algorithm for their design. Experimental results are shown for the Gaussian scalar asymmetric case.