Cooperative Source Coding with Encoder Breakdown

This paper provides an inner bound to the rate- distortion region of a source coding setup in which two encoders are allowed some collaboration to describe a pair of discrete memoryless sources. We further require some robustness in case one of the encoders breaks down. This is modeled by having a second decoder, observing the messages from only one of the encoders. We prove the tightness of this inner bound for two special cases. In the first, one of the sources is required to be recovered losslessly if there is no encoder breakdown. In the second, the robustness requirement is dropped and only one of the sources is to be represented. For the second case, we explicitly compute the rate-distortion region for the quadratic Gaussian and binary Hamming problems.