Robust SPIHT-Coded Image Transmission over Wireless Channels Using Packetization

A novel joint source channel coding scheme for robust transmission of zerotree wavelet-coded image over wireless noisy channels is proposed. We combine the packetization with unequal error protection (UEP) technique in this paper. First, the source embedded bitstream is packetized into independently decodable packets to improve its robustness. Then each packet is unequally protected by forward error correction (FEC) with a concatenation of cyclic redundancy check (CRC) code and rate-compatible punctured convolutional (RCPC) code. We also proposed an efficient rate-allocation algorithm for UEP. Experiment results show that our system performs well over Rayleigh flat-fading channels and outperforms the previous methods developed without paketization or UEP.