JPEG2000 Images Transmission over Noisy Wireless Channels with Unequal Power Distribution Wavelet Transmultiplexing

This paper deals with the robust transmission of JPEG2000 (JP2) images over wireless channels. It proposes a comparison among a wavelet transmultiplexer based communication system with a proper unequal distribution of the transmission power among JP2 coding units, and some state of the art techniques on this topic. In the proposed method, packets are formed by partitioning the JP2 stream and then transmitted through separate wavelet sub-channels. Both packet grouping and power distribution are driven by the native JP2 rate-distortion function, according to the contribution of each coding unit to the decoded image quality. The major strength of the proposed method is the flexibility on assigning a different protection level over each transmission subband by selecting the transmission power from a continuous range of possible values. This allows combating the influence of fading impairments typical of wireless channels. The performance of this technique is evaluated in case of BSC and Gilbert-Elliot (GE) channels and compared to the state of the art techniques on this topic.