Robust image transmission over powerline channel with impulse noise

This paper addresses the robust image transmission over powerline communication (PLC) channel in the presence of impulse noise. Under this framework, an adaptive noise clipping-based hybrid progressive median filter (ANC-HPMF), which is a combination of hybrid progressive median filter, noise clipping technique, image compression algorithm and coded OFDM modulation is designed to ensure image transmission over the PLC channel. For this purpose, image compression and turbo codes algorithms are inserted before image transmission in order to reduce the size of the transmitted data, and, therefore, save a significant amount of the PLC channel for forward error correction. The adaptive noise clipping method using neighboring coefficients is designed at the receiver side as a first stage. It is based on an improved estimation of noise threshold from the standard deviation of the noise and the peak value of the received noisy image. To enhance the performance of the proposed system, a new form of median filter is applied to the received image as a second stage of impulse noise reduction. By combining the noise clipping and the new median filtering, the proposed technique showed high robustness for the reduction of impulse noise even under high impulse level conditions while maintaining good visual quality of the images by preserving the edges. The performances of the proposed technique were compared with other well-known methods dedicated for impulse noise reduction, and showed much superior performance against the impulse noise generated over the PLC channel.