Joint source-channel coding for highly efficient error resilient image transmission

In the paper, three error resilient coding schemes are proposed and integrated with our previously developed high performance significance-linked connected component analysis (SLCCA) wavelet image codec. First, the cross-scale significance-links that exploit cross-scale dependency are reduced thereby error resilience of the source codec is increased. Second, hierarchical resynchronization is applied, i.e., resynchronization markers are inserted in the bitstream after each bit-plane and possibly per each scale and/or subband. Third, bit-plane-wise unequal error protection is applied, with the parity bits being exponentially distributed among bit-planes. Extensive performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed joint source-channel coding algorithm for image transmission is not only highly efficient but also highly robust.