An error resilient JPEG 2000 for wireless applications

Abstract

An efficient and versatile wavelet based picture compression standard, known as JPEG 2000, is under development. Since wireless multimedia is among the intended applications of this standard, JPEG 2000 has to be robust to channel errors. Our results indicate that the quality of received imagery using JPEG 2000 even with error resilient provisions could be very poor. Worst case PSNR serves as an important bench mark for comparing image transmission schemes and a larger worst case peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) is preferred. We present a scheme for increasing worst case PSNR, known as transmission diversity for JPEG 2000. In TD-JPEG 2000, instead of transmitting an image at full rate, the image is transmitted twice at half rate. The image encoder and decoder structures are given and a detailed operation of the decoder based on a set of rules is provided. It is observed that the worst case PSNR improves significantly compared to conventional JPEG 2000 when our method is applied to the transmission of images over noisy channels. Additionally, subjective evaluations of the received images verify the improvements in picture quality.