ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces a method of transmitting still images over fading channels using combined source channel coding based on lllaterial presented in Chapters 1, 3, and 4. Firstly, the source significance information produced by the source coder is obtained. Based upon the significance of the bits, unequal error protection using RCPC [1] codes is applied allo\ving the channel coding to be varied accordingly. An error concealment technique is introduced and used to improve the decoded image in cases where residual channel errors cause the corruption of the average luminance level during decoding. Experiments are conducted over highly error prone Rayleigh fading channels comparing the performance of this method with another method using fixed rate Reed-Solomon codes with the channel being constrained to a transmission rate of 1.0 bits/pixel. This method, in addition to just transmitting still images, can also be used to transmit the intra coded frame in video compression schemes such as H.263 [2] or MPEG-4 [3].
