A multiple description CEO problem with log-loss distortion

Georg Pichler, Pablo Piantanida, Gerald Matz

Abstract: This paper investigates the Multiple Description (MD) Chief Executive Officer (CEO) problem under logarithmic-loss distortion. The setup extends previous work of Courtade and Weissman (2014) by requiring the CEO to obtain a useful reconstruction also from a reduced set of descriptions. A single-letter characterization of the achievable region is derived under a suitable conditional independence assumption. Surprisingly, the resulting rate requirement is in general less than that required to ensure successful typicality decoding of the corresponding description.