On Lossy Source Coding With Side Information Under the Erasure Distortion Measure

We consider the Wyner-Ziv and two way source coding problems with the erasure distortion measure. We characterize the rate-distortion regions for these settings, when the source and side information satisfy a positivity condition. Using our results, we show that, contrary to recent conjectures in the literature, feedback from the decoder to the encoder does not reduce the overall rate required in the Wyner-Ziv setting with erasure distortion, when the positivity condition is satisfied. Finally, we extend our techniques to characterize the rate-distortion regions of two multiterminal source coding settings, the Heegard-Berger setting, and the cascade source coding setting, when the positivity condition is satisfied.