Near-lossless compression and protection by turbo source-channel (de-)coding using irregular index assignments

In this paper, we present a novel near-lossless compression scheme for scalar-quantized source codec parameters. The scheme is comparable to a Turbo source coding approach and can inherently incorporate protection against transmission errors. We show that using the concept of EXIT charts and irregular codes, a linear programming optimization problem can be formulated and the solution of this problem leads to an irregular index assignment offering the best possible compression given the considered system model and a fixed channel quality. The performance of the compression scheme is demonstrated by a simulation example.