title: Operational rate-distortion performance for joint source and channel coding of images.
abstract: This paper describes a methodology for evaluating the operational rate-distortion behavior of combined source and channel coding schemes with particular application to images. In particular, we demonstrate use of the operational rate-distortion function to obtain the optimum tradeoff between source coding accuracy and channel error protection under the constraint of a fixed transmission bandwidth for the investigated transmission schemes. Furthermore, we develop information-theoretic bounds on performance for specific source and channel coding systems and demonstrate that our combined source-channel coding methodology applied to different schemes results in operational rate-distortion performance which closely approach these theoretical limits. We concentrate specifically on a wavelet-based subband source coding scheme and the use of binary rate-compatible punctured convolutional (RCPC) codes for transmission over the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. Explicit results for real-world images demonstrate the efficacy of this approach.
authors.affiliation: German Aerospace Research Establishment, Institute for Communications Technology, D-82234 Wessling, Germany.
authors.forename: M J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Ruf
authors.forename: J W
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: Modestino