A simulation involving MAPS video bandwidth reduction, acoustic channel errors, and error checking

The reliable acoustic transmission of images that have been processed by a video bandwidth reduction technique such as Micro-Adaptive Picture Sequencing (MAPS) necessitates a robust coding scheme. This is due to the fact that errors effect compressed data more seriously than uncompressed data. For this reason image quality is a function of three system variables: image compression, channel noise, and error checking. A real-time simulation has been developed to determine the relationship between the three system variables. The simulator uses two 68000 microcomputers connected by a serial link; one does image compression and noise modeling while the other performs error checking and image reconstruction. The noise model uses 17 characteristics and operating parameters of the acoustic channel to corrupt the image data with single bit random errors. At the receiver the error checking can correct up to 90 percent of the most serious single bit errors.