Family of image compression algorithms which are robust to transmission errors

In this work, we present a new family of image compression algorithms derived from Shapiro's embedded zerotree wavelet (EZW) coder. These new algorithms introduce robustness to transmission errors into the bit stream while still preserving its embedded structure. This is done by partitioning the wavelet coefficients into groups, coding each group independently, and interleaving the bit streams for transmission, thus if one bit is corrupted, then only one of these bit streams will be truncated in the decoder. If each group of wavelet coefficients uniformly spans the entire image, then the objective and subjective qualities of the reconstructed image are very good. To illustrate the advantages of this new family, we compare it to the conventional EZW coder. For example, one variation has a peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) slightly lower than that of the conventional algorithm when no errors occur, but when a single error occurs at bit 1000, the PSNR of the new coder is well over 5 dB higher for both test images. Finally, we note that the new algorithms do not increase the complexity of the overall system and, in fact, they are far more easily parallelized than the conventional EZW coder.