Unequal Error Protection for SPIHT-Coded Image Transmission Based on MIMO Adaptive Channel Assignment Policy

In this paper, a joint source-channel coding (JSCC) scheme for unequal error protection (UEP) based SPIHT-coded image transmission over wireless channels is proposed. SPIHT-coded image information is divided into different substreams according to their different importance. Each substream is transmitted differentially over MIMO system based on MIMO adaptive channel assignment policy (ACAP) to achieve unequal error protection. ACAP is able to assign different important substreams to corresponding subchannels with different qualities of MIMO in terms of estimated subchannel state information based on a training preamble. Simulation results show that the scheme with ACAP can achieve UEP for image transmission. The quality of reconstructed image improves obviously compared to the scheme without ACAP.