We study the problem of distributed sampling and compression in sensor networks when the sensors are digital cameras that acquire a 3-D visual scene of interest from different viewing positions. We assume that sensors cannot communicate among themselves, but can process their acquired data and transmit it to a common central receiver. The main task of the receiver is then to reconstruct the best possible estimation of the original scene and the natural issue, in this context, is to understand the interplay in the reconstruction between sampling and distributed compression.

In this paper, we show that if the observed scene belongs to the class of signals that can be represented with a finite number of parameters, we can determine the minimum number of sensors that allows perfect reconstruction of the scene. Then, we present a practical distributed coding approach that leads to a rate-distortion behaviour at the decoder that is independent of the number of sensors, when this number increases beyond the critical sampling. In other words, we show that the distortion at the decoder does not depend on the number of sensors used, but only on the total number of bits that can be transmitted from the sensors to the receiver.