Progressive image communication over binary channels with additive bursty noise

A progressive method for transmission of images over a bursty noise channel is presented. It is based on discrete wavelet transform (DWT) coding and channel-optimized scalar quantization. The main advantage of the proposed system is that it exploits the channel memory and hence has superior performance over a similar scheme designed for the equivalent memoryless channel through the use of channel interleaving. In fact, the performance of the proposed system improves as the noise becomes more correlated, at a fixed bit error rate. Comparisons are made with other alternatives which employ independent source and channel coding over the fully interleaved channel at various bit rates and bit error rates. It is shown that the proposed method outperforms these substantially more complex systems for the whole range of considered bit rates and for a wide range of channel conditions.