An optimal unequal error protection scheme with turbo product codes for wavelet compression of ultraspectral sounder data

Abstract

Most source coding techniques generate bitstream where different regions have unequal influences on data reconstruction. An uncorrected error in a more influential region can cause more error propagation in the reconstructed data. Given a limited bandwidth, unequal error protection (UEP) via channel coding with different code rates for different regions of bitstream may yield much less error contamination than equal error protection (EEP). We propose an optimal UEP scheme that minimizes error contamination after channel and source decoding. We use JPEG2000 for source coding and turbo product code (TPC) for channel coding as an example to demonstrate this technique with ultraspectral sounder data. Wavelet compression yields unequal significance in different wavelet resolutions. In the proposed UEP scheme, the statistics of erroneous pixels after TPC and JPEG2000 decoding are used to determine the optimal channel code rates for each wavelet resolution. The proposed UEP scheme significantly reduces the number of pixel errors when compared to its EEP counterpart. In practice, with a predefined set of implementation parameters (available channel codes, desired code rate, noise level, etc.), the optimal code rate allocation for UEP needs to be determined only once and can be done offline.