Error-resilient binary multiplexed source codes

The paper addresses the issue of robust transmission of VLC encoded sources over error-prone channels. We have recently introduced a new family of codes, called multiplexed codes. They exploit the fact that real signal compression systems generate sources of information with different levels of priority. Multiplexed codes allow the desynchronization phenomenon to be confined to low priority data while allowing the entropy bound to be reached asymptotically for both (low and high priority) sources. A multiplexing procedure based on an iterative Euclidian decomposition has been proposed. This paper introduces a variant of multiplexed codes, called binary multiplexed codes, together with a very simple multiplexing algorithm that exploits the structure of variable length codetrees. It is shown analytically and experimentally that this family of codes is more error resilient than fixed length codes while reaching the compression efficiency of classical variable length codes.