Error resilience in JPEG2000

The rapid growth of wireless communication and widespread access to information has resulted in a strong demand for robust transmission of compressed images over wireless channels. The challenge of robust transmission is to protect the compressed image data against loss, in such a way as to maximize the received image quality. This thesis addresses this problem and provides an investigation of a forward error correction (FEC) technique that has been evaluated in the context of the emerging JPEG2000 standard. Not much effort has been made in the JPEG2000 project regarding error resilience. The only techniques standardized are based on insertion of marker codes in the code-stream, which may be used to restore high-level synchronization between the decoder and the code-stream. This helps to localize error and prevent it from propagating through the entire code-stream. Once synchronization is achieved, additional tools aim to exploit as much of the remaining data as possible. Although these techniques help, they cannot recover lost data. FEC adds redundancy into the bit-stream, in exchange for increased robustness to errors. We investigate unequal protection schemes for JPEG2000 by applying different levels of protection to different quality layers in the code-stream. More particularly, the results reported in this thesis provide guidance concerning the selection of JPEG2000 coding parameters and appropriate combinations of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes for typical wireless bit error rates. We find that unequal protection schemes together with the use of resynchronization makers and some additional tools can significantly improve the image quality in deteriorating channel conditions. The proposed channel coding scheme is easily incorporated into the existing JPEG2000 code-stream structure and experimental results clearly demonstrate the viability of our approac