Joint source/channel coding in 3D-JPEG2000 for wireless 3D region of interest transmission in 3D medical imaging data

This paper presents a joint source/channel coding method in 3D-JPEG2000 for wireless transmission of 3D regions of interest (RoIs) in 3D medical images. The method provides unequal error protection by combining the error correction capabilities of channel codes with the 3D-JPEG2000 error resilience tools. It generates quality scalable and error-resilient code streams with 3D-RoI decoding capabilities. The robustness of the proposed method is evaluated over Rayleigh-fading channels with rate-compatible punctured turbo codes. Comparisons are made with the cases of equal error protection and unequal error protection. Evaluations results on real 3D medical images show a significant improvement in reconstruction quality of the received 3D-RoIs and 3D images, in terms of the average peak signal-to-noise ratio.