Robust transmission of JPEG2000 images over Rayleigh fading channels

The JPEG2000 standard has been recently established for coding still images. This standard is likely to be used extensively in the near future. This work addresses the issue of robust transmission of JPEG2000 images over Rayleigh-fading channels. Two unequal channel protection techniques are proposed by taking into account the effect of channel errors of the different layers and packets of the JPEG2000 bit-stream. For a given transmission bandwidth and multi-layered JPEG2000 bit-stream, the proposed techniques adaptively select the best protection scheme according to the channel conditions. The robustness of the proposed techniques 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 no channel protection and equal channel protection when the protection is optimally designed for the channel conditions. Simulation results show a significant improvement on the quality of the received images.