Perceptual-based quality assessment of error protection schemes for wireless JPEG2000

Designing wireless imaging services with acceptable quality imposes great challenges due to the severe impairments induced by wireless channels, high data rate demands and limited transmission bandwidth. In this paper, we examine different error protection schemes for the JPEG2000 codestream using the error control codes offered by the wireless JPEG2000 (JPWL) standard. In particular, two unequal error protection (UEP) schemes are considered. In the first scheme, only the initial and more important packets of the JPWL codestream are protected while the remaining packets are left without protection. In contrast, the second scheme uses a strong code for the initial packets while a weaker code is used for the tail packets. As quality of visual services may not be captured adequately with traditional link layer metrics, code selection and their performance assessment is based on perceptual quality metrics. Specifically, the L_P-norm, structural similarity (SSIM) index and visual information fidelity (VIF) criterion are utilized. Numerical results are provided for a range of system conditions under which UEP outperforms conventional equal error protection in terms of perceptual quality metrics.