Unequal Error Protection for Wireless Imaging

Abstract: This thesis work was to examine the unequal error protection (UEP) scheme for joint photographic experts group (JPEG) 2000 images over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and a Rayleigh fading channel. The JPEG 2000 standard provides an effective image compression that result in increasing effect of transmission errors. To mitigate this problem, the UEP scheme was used to protect the region of interest (ROI) with a strong (63, 36) Bose Chadhuri Hocquenghem (BCH) code whereas the background (BG) with a weaker (7, 4) Hamming code. ROI is one of the features supported by the JPEG 2000 standard that allows compressing a specified portion of image with a better quality than the BG of the image. In case of equal error protection (EEP) scheme every information block was protected with a single code. This approach used both qualitative and quantitative performance comparisons between UEP and EEP schemes in evaluating the simulation results. Three test images of Lena, Elaine and Mandrill were taken in this thesis. They were compressed and tested over computer simulated AWGN and Rayleigh fading channel models for a range of signal to noise ratio (SNR) values with both UEP and EEP schemes. The qualitative performance comparisons involved the image perceptual quality and the quantitative performance comparisons were based on the statistical average peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) values of the reconstructed image. The conclusions revealed that UEP scheme exhibits a notable growth in both qualitative and quantitative performance compared to conventional EEP scheme that was measured in terms of required SNR and decodable received images.