Design of ring convolutional trellis codes for MAP decoding of MPEG-4 images

We propose a trellis-coded modulation system using continuous-phase frequency-shift keying (CPFSK) and ring convolutional codes for transmitting the bits generated by an embedded zerotree wavelet encoder. Improved performance is achieved by using maximum a posteriori decoding of the zerotree symbols, and ring convolutional trellis codes are determined for this decoding method. The CPFSK transmitter is decomposed into a memoryless modulator and a continuous phase encoder over the ring of integers modulo 4; the latter is combined with a polynomial convolutional encoder over the same ring. In the code design process, a search is made of the combined trellis, where the branch metrics are modified to include the source transition matrix. Simulation results of image transmission are provided using the optimized system, including mismatched channel cases.