Adaptive Unequal Channel Protection for JPEG2000 Images

An adaptive unequal channel protection technique is proposed for JPEG2000 images by exploiting the hierarchical structure of the bit-stream. The proposed technique takes into account the effect of channel errors in different packets of the bit-stream in order to optimally protect the coded data. For a given transmission bandwidth and multi-layered JPEG2000 bit-stream, the proposed technique adaptively selects the best protection scheme according to the channel conditions. The robustness of the proposed technique is evaluated over a Rayleigh fading channel with a concatenation of a cyclic redundancy check code and a rate-compatible convolutional code. Comparisons are made with the case of equal channel protection and unequal channel protection when the protection is designed for the worst channel conditions. Simulation results show a significant improvement of the PSNR of the received images.