Compressed Image Transmission Based on Systematic Raptor Codes with Unequal Error Protection

A scheme for image transmission over wireless channel is proposed. Being rateless, fountain codes could reduce system complexity and no feedback channel is needed. Traditional fountain code has a low decoding efficiency, and the quality of the recovered information is sensitive to noise. Based on systematic Raptor, this method can improve the decoding efficiency because decoding is not even needed in the ideal channel. With the introduction of Unequal Error Protection (UEP) characteristics, this scheme makes the bitrate optimized according to the importance of information, so that a better stability can be achieved at different channel conditions. The experiment results show that, compared with traditional error-correcting codes and Raptor with Equal Error Protection (EEP), this scheme can greatly improve the transmission reliability and achieve better reconstructed image quality over Binary?Erasure Channel (BEC).