Joint Source / Channel Coding for Image and Video Transmission

With the rapid growth of data communication infrastructure, there has been an increasing demand for multimedia communication services over the past years. This rapid growth has posed new requirements and challenges in many related research areas. This dissertation studies the problem of efficient and robust transmission of image and video content over noisy channels. Firstly, joint source/channel coding algorithms are proposed for image transmission based on the new image coding stan­ dard JPEG2000. By combining the forward error correction capability provided by channel coding, together with the scalability and error resilience (ER) features pro­ vided by JPEG2000, the algorithms can achieve unequal error protection gains as well as robust source decoding for single image transmission over band-limited channels. Secondly, joint source/channel coding algorithms for multiple sources transmission over a common channel sharing a given total bandwidth are proposed. The algorithms exploit the rate-distortion diversity among multiple sources to optimally distribute a total bit rate given by the channel. It is demonstrated that both improved quality and reduced quality variance can be achieved at the receiver by the proposed algo­ rithms. Finally, a robust image transmission scheme is proposed for packet erasure channels. The algorithm is based on the ER functionalities provided by JPEG2000