Real-time unequal error protection for wireless imaging

In this paper, we propose a new unequal error protection (UEP) scheme for wireless imaging. Our technique is based on approximating the optimal parity distribution using offline and online processing. For a given parity budget and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the offline processing is responsible for obtaining the optimal parity distribution and an approximation of it using polynomial curve fitting. Subsequently, in the online processing, the obtained polynomial parameters are used to regenerate the parity distribution curve. Eventually, channel codes are assigned to the packets of the codestream based on the regenerated parity distribution curve. The complexity of the proposed technique is very low which makes it suitable for realtime wireless imaging, especially for mobile devices that have low processing power and operate with very low memory. Despite having very low complexity, the proposed UEP technique gives still close to optimal performance.