Joint UEP and Layered Source Coding with Application to Transmission of JPEG-2000 Coded Images

This paper presents a joint source-channel coding framework based on layered source coding and Reed-Solomon channel coding for unequal error protection. An iterative procedure is described to search for the best source coding rate and the optimal UEP of layered bitstreams. We apply our JSCC technique to transmission of JPEG-2000 coded images over binary symmetric channels. Compared to results reported in the literature, our UEP based approach gives better results while having lower complexity.