Joint Decoding of Unequally Protected JPEG2000 Bitstreams and Reed-Solomon Codes

In this paper we present joint decoding of JPEG2000 bitstreams and Reed-Solomon codes in the context of unequal loss protection. Using error resilience features of JPEG2000 bitstreams, the joint decoder helps to restore the erased symbols when the Reed-Solomon decoder fails to retrieve them on its own. However, the joint decoding process might become time-consuming due to a search through the set of possible erased symbols. We propose the use of smaller codeblocks and transmission of a relatively small amount of side information with high reliability as two approaches to accelerate the joint decoding process. The accelerated joint decoder can deliver essentially the same quality enhancement as the nonaccelerated one, while operating several times faster.