Unequal Power Allocation for Transmission of JPEG2000 Images over Wireless Channels

In this paper, we present an unequal power allocation method that exploits the hierarchical structure of JPEG2000 coded bitstream, along with the channel state information, to assign different transmission powers to different parts of the bitstream at the coding pass level. Based on the information from the JPEG2000 bitstream, we first develop a distortion model to evaluate the distortion of the reconstructed image in terms of the power assigned to each coding pass within the bitstream. Using this model and the channel information, the powers are calculated such that the distortion of the decoded image is minimized. Simulation results show up to 7 dB improvement in the decoded image quality compared to the case of equal power allocation and up to 4 dB enhancement compared to the state-of-the-art methods proposed for the transmission of JPEG2000 streams over wireless channels.