Polar Codes for Multiple Descriptions

A polar coding scheme is proposed for the multiple description coding (MDC) problem and is shown to be able to achieve a certain rate pair on the dominant line of the achievable rate region determined by El Gamal and Cover. This scheme is an adaptation of the one developed by Şaşoğlu et al. for the multiple access channel (MAC) to the MDC setting. The analysis of the proposed scheme contains two new ingredients: 1) a certain MDC-MAC duality and 2) an auxiliary random process that involves both the mutual information and the Bhattacharyya parameter. The decorrelation effect of the polar transform is also investigated.