Successive Wyner-Ziv Coding Scheme and its Application to the Quadratic Gaussian CEO Problem

We introduce a distributed source coding scheme called successive Wyner-Ziv coding scheme. We show that any point in the rate region of the quadratic Gaussian CEO problem can be achieved via the successive Wyner-Ziv coding. The notion of successive refinement in the single source coding is generalized to the distributed source coding scenario, which we refer to as distributed successive refinement. For the quadratic Gaussian CEO problem, we establish a necessary and sufficient condition for distributed successive refinement, where the successive Wyner-Ziv coding scheme plays an important role.