Error-resilient binary multiplexed source codes

This paper addresses the issue of robust transmission of VL-C encoded sources over error-prone channels. A new family of codes, called multiplexed codes, has been recently introduced in [1]. They exploit the fact that compression systems of real signals generate sources of information with different levels of priority. Multiplexed codes allow to confine the de-synchronization phenomenon to low priority data while allowing to reach asymptotically the entropy bound for both (low and high priority) sources. A multiplexing procedure based on an iterative Euclidian decomposition has been proposed. This paper introduces a variant of multiplexed codes, called binary multiplexed codes, together with a very simple multiplexing algorithm that exploits the structure of variable length codetrees. It is shown analytically and experimentally that this family of codes is more error resilient than fixed length codes while reaching the compression efficiency of classical variable length codes.