Transmission of Two-tone Images over Noisy Channels with Memory

Source and channel coding are two problems that have traditionally been implemented separately, forming what is known as a tandem source-channel coding system. The separation of channel and source coding is only optimal in an asymptotic sense, i.e., when no constraints exist on the coding block lengths (delay) and on the complexity of the encoder/decoder [1]. Joint source-channel coding, however, has recently received increased attention. It has been shown that if delay and complexity are constrained, performance can be increased if the source and channel codes are jointly designed, as opposed to being treated independently [2, 3].