Network coding meets multimedia: a review

While every network node only relays messages in a traditional communication system, the recent network coding (NC) paradigm proposes to implement simple in-network processing with packet combinations in the nodes. NC extends the concept of "encoding" a message beyond source coding (for compression) and channel coding (for protection against errors and losses). It has been shown to increase network throughput compared to traditional networks implementation, to reduce delay and to provide robustness to transmission errors and network dynamics. These features are so appealing for multimedia applications that they have spurred a large research effort towards the development of multimedia-specific NC techniques. This paper reviews the recent work in NC for multimedia applications and focuses on the techniques that fill the gap between NC theory and practical applications. It outlines the benefits of NC and presents the open challenges in this area. The paper initially focuses on multimedia-specific aspects of network coding, in particular delay, in-network error control, and mediaspecific error control. These aspects permit to handle varying network conditions as well as client heterogeneity, which are critical to the design and deployment of multimedia systems. After introducing these general concepts, the paper reviews in detail two applications that lend themselves naturally to NC via the cooperation and broadcast models, namely peer-to-peer multimedia streaming and wireless networkin

Joint Source-Channel Coding of JPEG 2000 Image Transmission Over Two-Way Multi-Relay Networks

In this paper, we develop a two-way multi-relay scheme for JPEG 2000 image transmission. We adopt a modified time-division broadcast (TDBC) cooperative protocol, and derive its power allocation and relay selection under a fairness constraint. The symbol error probability of the optimal system configuration is then derived. After that, a joint source-channel coding (JSCC) problem is formulated to find the optimal number of JPEG 2000 quality layers for the image and the number of channel coding packets for each JPEG 2000 codeblock that can minimize the reconstructed image distortion for the two users, subject to a rate constraint. Two fast algorithms based on dynamic programming (DP) and branch and bound (BB) are then developed. Simulation demonstrates that the proposed JSCC scheme achieves better performance and lower complexity than other similar transmission systems

Transmission of Images over Noisy Channels Using Error-resilient Wavelet Coding and Forward Error Correction

A novel embedded wavelet coding scheme is proposed for the transmission of images over unreliable channels. The proposed scheme is based on the partitioning of information into a number of layers which can be decoded independently provided that some important and highly protected information is initially errorlessly transmitted to the decoder. Forward Error Correction is used in conjunction with the error-resilient source coder for the protection of the compressed stream. Unlike many other robust coding schemes presented to-date, the proposed scheme is able to decode portions of the bitstream even after the occurrence of uncorrectable errors. This coding strategy is very suitable for application with block coding schemes such as defined by the JPEG2000 standard. The proposed scheme is compared with other robust image coders and is shown to be very suitable for transmission of images over memoryless channels

Data hiding in images based on fractal modulation and diversity combining

The current work provides a new data-embedding infrastructure based on fractal modulation. The embedding problem is tackled from a communications point of view. The data to be embedded becomes the signal to be transmitted through a watermark channel. The channel could be the image itself or some manipulation of the image. The image self noise and noise due to attacks are the two sources of noise in this paradigm. At the receiver, the image self noise has to be suppressed, while noise due to the attacks may sometimes be predicted and inverted. The concepts of fractal modulation and deterministic self-similar signals are extended to 2-dimensional images. These novel techniques are used to build a deterministic bi-homogenous watermark signal that embodies the binary data to be embedded. The binary data to be embedded, is repeated and scaled with different amplitudes at each level and is used as the wavelet decomposition pyramid. The binary data is appended with special marking data, which is used during demodulation, to identify and correct unreliable or distorted blocks of wavelet coefficients. This specially constructed pyramid is inverted using the inverse discrete wavelet transform to obtain the self-similar watermark signal. In the data embedding stage, the well-established linear additive technique is used to add the watermark signal to the cover image, to generate the watermarked (stego) image. Data extraction from a potential stego image is done using diversity combining. Neither the original image nor the original binary sequence (or watermark signal) is required during the extraction. A prediction of the original image is obtained using a cross-shaped window and is used to suppress the image self noise in the potential stego image. The resulting signal is then decomposed using the discrete wavelet transform. The number of levels and the wavelet used are the same as those used in the watermark signal generation stage. A thresholding process similar to wavelet de-noising is used to identify whether a particular coefficient is reliable or not. A decision is made as to whether a block is reliable or not based on the marking data present in each block and sometimes corrections are applied to the blocks. Finally the selected blocks are combined based on the diversity combining strategy to extract the embedded binary data

Adaptive error protection coding for wireless transmission of motion JPEG 2000 video

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