Windowed encoding of spatially coupled LDGM codes for lossy source compression

Recently, it has been shown that a class of spatially coupled low-density generator-matrix (SC-LDGM) code ensembles displays distortion saturation for the lossy binary symmetric source coding problem with the belief propagation guided decimation (BPGD) algorithm, i.e., the BPGD distortion approaches the optimal expected distortion of the underlying ensemble asymptotically in code length. Here, we investigate the distortion performance of a practical class of protograph-based SC-LDGM code ensembles and demonstrate distortion saturation numerically. Moreover, we propose an efficient windowed encoding (WE) algorithm that takes advantage of the convolutional structure of the SC-LDGM codes. By using the WE algorithm, a distortion very close to the rate-distortion limit can be achieved for a fixed compression rate with low-to-moderate encoding latency.