  A general method of source coding over expansion is proposed in this paper,
which enables one to reduce the problem of compressing an analog
(continuous-valued source) to a set of much simpler problems, compressing
discrete sources. Specifically, the focus is on lossy compression of
exponential and Laplacian sources, which is subsequently expanded using a
finite alphabet prior to being quantized. Due to decomposability property of
such sources, the resulting random variables post expansion are independent and
discrete. Thus, each of the expanded levels corresponds to an independent
discrete source coding problem, and the original problem is reduced to coding
over these parallel sources with a total distortion constraint. Any feasible
solution to the optimization problem is an achievable rate distortion pair of
the original continuous-valued source compression problem. Although finding the
solution to this optimization problem at every distortion is hard, we show that
our expansion coding scheme presents a good solution in the low distrotion
regime. Further, by adopting low-complexity codes designed for discrete source
coding, the total coding complexity can be tractable in practice.
