We present in this paper an integrated robust image transmission scheme using space-time block codes (STBC) over multi-input multi-output (MIMO) wireless systems. First, in order to achieve an excellent error resilient capability, multiple bitstreams are generated based on wavelet trees along the spatial orientations. The spatial-orientation trees in the wavelet domain are individually encoded using SPIHT. Error propagation is thus limited within each bitstreams. Then, Reed-Solomon (R-S) codes as forward error correction (FEC) are adopted to combat transmission errors over error-prone wireless channels and to detect residual errors so as to avoid error propagation in each bitstream. FEC can reduce the bit error rates at the expenses of increased data rate. However, it is often difficult to design an optimal FEC scheme for a time-varying multi-path fading channel that may fluctuate beyond the capacity of the adopted FEC scheme. Therefore, in order to overcome such difficulty, we propose an approach to alleviate the effect of multi-path fading by employing the STBC for spatial diversity with assumption that channel state information (CSI) is perfectly estimated at the receiver. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve much improved performance in terms of PSNR over Rayleigh flat fading channel as compared with a wireless system without spatial diversity.

Date Published: 2 May 2006
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 6250, Mobile Multimedia/Image Processing for Military and Security Applications, 62500I (2 May 2006); doi: 10.1117/12.665904

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6250:
Mobile Multimedia/Image Processing for Military and Security Applications
Sos S. Agaian; Sabah A. Jassim, Editor(s)