Hybrid digital analog transform coding

Abstract

One problem of conventional digital transmission systems is that the transmission fidelity always saturates at the design channel quality (worst-case channel condition); this saturation is due to the irreversible quantization error introduced by the source coder. Hybrid digital analog (HDA) codes address this problem by additionally transmitting the inherent quantization error by pseudo-analog methods. However, the design and the decoding of these HDA codes is complex or even impossible for long block lengths (look-up table decoding). In this study we propose an HDA transmission system for sources with correlation supporting long block lengths. This is achieved by combining transform coding with HDA transmission using well-known digital channel codes. For the evaluation Monte Carlo simulations are used with a normalized discrete cosine transform (DCTN) and Turbo codes as the digital part and LMMSE estimation in the pseudo-analog part of the HDA system. The proposed HDA system with transform coding outperforms the purely digital transmission system at all channel qualities and exploits the expected gain due to source correlation.