Lossless polar compression of q-ary sources

In this paper, lossless polar compression of q-ary memoryless sources in the noiseless setting is investigated. Polar compression scheme for binary memoryless sources, introduced by Cronie and Korada, is generalized to sources over prime-size alphabets. In order to reduce the average codeword length, a compression scheme based on successive cancellation list decoding is proposed. Also, a specific configuration for the compression of correlated sources is considered, and it is shown that the introduced polar compression schemes achieve the corner point of the admissible rate region. Based on this result, proposed compression schemes are extended to arbitrary finite source alphabets by using a layered approach.