On Bit Error Robustness of Trellis Source Codes

Trellis codes based on linear congruential recursions have recently been introduced as powerful source codes. For a modest computational complexity they offer excellent rate distortion performance at low to moderate quantization rates. In this work the bit error sensitivity of these codes is explored. The theoretical analysis shows that for a given number of trellis states the deviation from the correct trellis path, caused by bit errors on the transmission channel, can be described by two code parameters alone. The theoretic approach is compared to Monte-Carlo simulations and show that the particular trellis source codes under consideration offer robust transmission for bit error ratios up to the order of 10^-3 without the aid of any explicit correcting channel code.