Robust image transmission using source adaptive modulation and trellis-coded quantization

The paper presents a robust, low-complexity method of transmitting digitally compressed imagery through very noisy channels. The method is applicable to AWGN and fading channels. The proposed method uses a robust wavelet based image coder employing trellis-coded quantization (TCQ), and optimal source adaptive modulation (SAM) which is implemented through time-frequency diversity. We compare the performance of the SAM-TCQ system to that of a system that utilizes unequal error protection (UEP). We show that for the binary symmetric channel (BSC), the SAM-TCQ system performs as well as UEP-TCQ at high bit error rates (BER), and within 1 dB of the UEP-TCQ system at low bit error rates