Error resilient image coding with rate-compatible punctured convolutional codes

In this paper, we describe an application of the rate-compatible punctured convolutional (RCPC) channel codes to an error-resilient image compression scheme with variable-coefficient fixed-length (VCFL) source codes. The VCFL source coder is error resilient because of its fixed length of the codes. Since it is based on wavelet transform, the scheme provides us with a hierarchical structure of the source codes to facilitate the unequal error protection by the channel codes. We adopt the RCPC codes for channel coding to achieve three goals: (1) unequal error protection, (2) single channel decoder with multiple rate compatibility, (3) minimizing controlled overhead redundancy. Preliminary results show that, with slightly higher bit rate, we can achieve better reconstructed image quality under at least an order of magnitude higher channel bit error rate