Polar codes for q-ary source coding
Mohammad Karzand, Emre Telatar · 2010
Polar coding is a recent channel coding technique invented by Arikan to achieve the 'symmetric capacity' of binary-input memoryless channels. Subsequently it was observed by Korada and Urbanke that such codes are also good for lossy channel coding, achieving the `symmetric rate distortion' bound, when the representation alphabet is binary. In this note we extend this result to the case when the representation alphabet is q-ary, for q a prime number.