We investigate the error exponent in the lossy source coding with a fidelity criterion. Marton (1974) established a formula of the reliability function for the stationary memoryless source with finite alphabet. In this paper, we consider a stationary memoryless source assuming that the alphabet space is a metric space and not necessarily finite nor discrete. Our aim is to prove that Marton's formula for the reliability function remains true even if the alphabet is general.

We are interesting in the error exponent for source coding with fidelity criterion. For each fixed distortion level Δ, the maximum attainable error exponent at rate R, as a function of R, is called the reliability function. The minimum rate achieving the given error exponent is called the minimum achievable rate. For memoryless sources with finite alphabet, Marton (1974) gave an expression of the reliability function. The aim of the paper is to derive formulas for the reliability function and the minimum achievable rate for memoryless Gaussian sources.