Soft Decision Demodulation and Transform Coding of Images

This paper describes a transform image coding system that uses soft decision demodulation to control channel errors. In soft decision demodulation, if certain received bits of a codeword representing a coefficient are unreliable, then the codeword is rejected and the corresponding coefficient is replaced with an estimate. By monitoring the three highest energy DCT coefficients, the reconstructed image quality can be improved for a channel with a bit error probability of 10^-2.