An efficient scheme for image transmission over error-prone channels: sigma filtering and image interpolation

Wireless networks and packet networks such as the Internet are prone to long burst errors and transient failures. In contrast to the traditional schemes that first introduce some amount of redundancy among descriptions before transmitting multimedia data to combat channel impairments, we investigate a new scheme to tackle this problem. The proposed scheme is to first capture the most important visual features of a given image extracted from Sigma filtering preprocessing, into independent equal length packets. At the receiver side, we adopt a smart interpolation-based technique. The reconstruction quality at the receiver depends only on the number of packets received, but is independent of the place from where they were cropped. The preliminary results on standard test images show that our reconstructed image is very pleasant to human eyes, and achieves reasonable PSNR values, while at the same time using a lower bit rate than other traditional reported schemes based on multiple description coding.