Fast Internet wavelet image transmission

Images are usually transmitted across the Internet using a lossless protocol such as TCP/IP. Lossless protocols require retransmission of lost packets; which substantially increase transmission time. We introduce a fast lossy Internet image transmission scheme (FLIIT) for compressed images which eliminates retransmission delays by strategically shielding important portions of the image with redundancy bits. We describe a joint source-channel coding algorithm which efficiently allocates quantizer resolution bits and redundancy bits to control quantization errors and expected packet transmission losses. We describe an implementation of this algorithm and compare its performance on the Internet to lossless TCP/IP transmission of the same images. In our experiments the FLIIT scheme transmitted images five times faster than TCP/IP during the day with resulting images of equivalent quality.