Error resilient JPEG2000 transmission over wireless fading channels

Abstract

[Abstract]: Transferring images and video over wireless channels is becoming more of an intended use of the medium as personal media move away from the restrictions of cables and transmission standards allow higher transmission speeds. The wireless medium however is not very reliable in the way that it adds unwanted components and noise to the wireless transmission. This paper will examine the performance of the JPWL standard in protecting images from this unwanted noise. JPEG2000 is the latest JPEG image standard created to replace the popular original JPEG standard. The new standard uses wavelet based compression rather than the block based discrete cosine transform (DCT). The JPWL extension for the wireless transmission of JPEG2000 images was finalised as a standard in 2007. As a result of the recent release of the standard, no papers could be found that utilised or tested it. Due to the time difference between the JPEG2000 standard being released in the year 2000 and the JPWL standard 7 years later, there are several papers proposing protection methods for the standard. Some of these papers show early work into what eventually became the final standard. The ISO/IEC 15444-11 standard (JPWL) has been written to allow quite a bit of flexibility with regards to specific implementations of the standard. The only real normative (required) parts of the standard include header protection for the main header and packet headers. In the event of a bad header, the whole image will fail decoding whereas bad image data will merely reduce quality. The JPWL standard has numerous informative (optional) sections to add protection to the image codestream. There are several protections available. One of the primary requirements of the standard is that any JPWL codestream can still be read and decoded by any standard JPEG2000 decoder. The wireless channel used for the testing phase is known as a grey channel. This is a Rayleigh Fading channel with Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) added as a noise component. This channel was used over several Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) to provide similar error rates as those found in some of the previous studies. The JPWL standard was found to perform very well in protecting the images against quality degradation during transmission over wireless channels. The strength of the protection plays a large part in the protection of the image and should be chosen to suit the particular channel in use. The Default Protection also provides very strong protection for the user who does not wish to choose their own setting. The JPEG and JPEG2000 standards were also tested to show how they suffered from losses incurred in wireless channels.