Error-resilient transmission of quality-scalable images over wireless channels

A new strategy for robust wireless transmission of scalable images is proposed. The proposed scheme utilizes the quality-progressive structure of the scalable code-stream and optimally protects different quality layers based on channel conditions using multi-rate low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, leading to a flexible joint source-channel coding design. To accommodate optimal channel protection to important source layers, this novel technique is able to truncate the less important ones, when necessary. Furthermore, the number of iterations to find the optimal solution does not depend on the number of scalable source elements. Results show that the proposed scheme facilitates considerable gains in terms of subjective and objective quality as well as decoding probability of the retrieved images. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.