  A likelihood encoder is studied in the context of lossy source compression.
The analysis of the likelihood encoder is based on the soft-covering lemma. It
is demonstrated that the use of a likelihood encoder together with the
soft-covering lemma yields simple achievability proofs for classical source
coding problems. The cases of the point-to-point rate-distortion function, the
rate-distortion function with side information at the decoder (i.e. the
Wyner-Ziv problem), and the multi-terminal source coding inner bound (i.e. the
Berger-Tung problem) are examined in this paper. Furthermore, a non-asymptotic
analysis is used for the point-to-point case to examine the upper bound on the
excess distortion provided by this method. The likelihood encoder is also
related to a recent alternative technique using properties of random binning.
