DC error correction for image transmission over wireless channels

With the advances in 3G mobile communications, wireless multimedia communications have received increased attention. One of the most serious problems in the wireless transmission of images is the loss of macroblock (MB) synchronization. In 1995, the error resilient entropy code (EREC) was proposed to solve the MB synchronization problem. However, EREC leads to two new error propagation issues: AC error propagation and DC error propagation. In this paper, we propose a DC error correction technique to tackle the DC error propagation problem. This technique requires no changes in the source encoder and decoder, and can make full use of the inserted DC values and the neighboring DC values to limit the effect of the DC error propagation. Various simulation results are presented and they demonstrate that the proposed technique improves the image quality significantly.