A Fast Hybrid Loss Protection Method with Quality of Service Provision for Image Transmission

The performance of the existing unequal loss protection system based on interleaver structure for progressive image transmission is usually measured by the expected quality without considering the minimum image quality requirement. In this paper, a new objective function named the effective expected quality is proposed, which is defined as the received expected quality excluding the contribution from failure transmission, i.e., the quality of the decoded image is below the minimum quality requirement. The performance criterion proposed is to maximize the effective expected quality under the constraint condition that the probability of failure transmission is below a given threshold. With this new performance criterion and equal and unequal protection strategies, a new local search algorithm is also presented for the allocation of the transmission bit budget between the source and channel codes. Experiments are carried out with the source coders of SPIHT and JPEG2000 by using the network model of two-state Markov. The results show that the new algorithm can provide higher effective expected quality and lower probability of failure transmission with significantly lower computational complexity compared with the previous algorithm.