The effect of acoustic transmission errors on reduced bandwidth image data

In attempting to acoustically transmit high data rate information such as video from an untethered vehicle a few problems are encountered. While redundancy reduction techniques are quite successful at minimizing the data transferred they often leave the data more vulnerable to serious corruption by channel errors. For this reason it is necessary to take a unified approach to the transmission of visual data through the water. The design of a practical system must allow for compatible operation of bandwidth reduction and error correction coding algorithms. This is needed since ultimate image quality is a function of image compression, channel noise and system error recovery. This paper will present tradeoffs between operation of various bandwidth reduction schemes and the feasibility of protecting the data against errors.