Progressive image coding on noisy channels

Numerous sophisticated techniques have been developed over the last several decades to efficiently transmit images across noisy channels. Here, we cascade an existing image coder with carefully chosen error control coding, and thus produce a progressive image compression scheme whose performance on a noisy channel is significantly better than that of previously known image compression techniques. The main idea is to trade off the available transmission rate between source coding and channel coding in an efficient manner. This coding system is easy to implement and has acceptably low complexity. Furthermore, effectively no degradation due to channel noise can be detected; instead, the penalty paid due to channel noise is a reduction in source coding resolution. As an example, for the 512×512 Lena image, at an overall transmission rate of 1 bit per pixel, and for binary symmetric channels with bit error probabilities 10^-3, 10^-2, and 10^-1, the proposed system typically outperforms other existing systems by at least 2.6 dB, 2.8 dB, and 8.9 dB, respectively