Background

Abstract

In this chapter we introduce the background necessary for the remainder of the monograph. This chapter is organized as follows: In section 3.1 we discuss rate distortion theory which is mostly concerned with the derivation of absolute bounds on the performance of a lossy data compression scheme. In section 3.2 we compare rate distortion theory to operational rate distortion theory, which is concerned with the optimality of a particular scheme. In section 3.3 we present the Lagrangian multiplier method in the context of operational rate distortion theory. In section 3.4 we give an overview of dynamic programming which is a general tool for sequential decision analysis. In section 3.5 we discuss a shortest path algorithm for a weighted directed acyclic graph which is related to dynamic programming and in section 3.6 we summarize this chapter.