On the robustness of a joint source-channel coding scheme for image transmission over non frequency selective Rayleigh fading channels

The aim of this paper is to present a joint source channel coding scheme for image transmission over a non frequency selective Rayleigh fading channel. Because of the very high BER, a JPEG or JPEG2000 compressed image cannot be transmitted without major visual degradation quality. On the one hand we use a compression algorithm based on wavelet transform and vector quantization called WTSOM (wavelet transform self organized map), and on the other hand we combine differential modulation, symbol interleaving, unequal error protection and antenna diversity to improve the performance of the transmission. The results show a relation between the received images PSNR and the normalized Doppler frequency of the Rayleigh channel. The performance of this joint source channel scheme allows us to obtain a good visual quality of the images even with very bad transmissions conditions