Restart marker regulation technique for progressive JPEG image coding in mobile communications

In this letter, an error-robust and JPEG compliant progressive image compression scheme over wireless channels is presented. The use of restart markers in the JPEG standard provides the resynchronization function for error handling. Unfortunately, misinterpreted markers may cause serious error damage due to the error propagation. Therefore, a restart marker regulation technique is proposed here to preprocess restart markers at the decoding end. All erroneous restart markers are corrected and rearranged in the correct order. After decoding, isolated erroneous restart intervals are detected and further processed by the error concealment to reduce image degradation. The simulations demonstrate that the proposed scheme does significantly improve the image quality in error-prone environments.