Joint source-channel image coding for a power constrained noisy channel

We study joint source-channel coding for a power constrained Gaussian channel and its application to progressive image compression. For a given power constrained, we consider the optimum allocation of energy per bit for a BPSK transmitter and the best choice of channel code rate, when the performance is measured by end-to-end average quantizer distortion. Choosing the average energy per transmitted bit in conjunction with both the source rate and the channel code rate provides an additional degree of freedom with respect to previously proposed schemes, and therefore can achieve higher overall PSNRs for images.