Fast synchronization recovery for lossy image transmission with a suffix-rich Huffman code
Te-Chung Yang, C.‐C. Jay Kuo · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1998
A new entropy codec, which can recover quickly from the loss of synchronization due to the occurrence of transmission errors, is proposed and applied to wireless image transmission in this research. This entropy codec is designed based on the Huffman code with a careful choice of the assignment of 1's and 0's to each branch of the Huffman tree. The design satisfies the suffix-rich property, i.e. the number of a codeword to be the suffix of other codewords is maximized. After the Huffman coding tree is constructed, the source can be coded by using the traditional Huffman code. Thus, this coder does not introduce any overhead to sacrifice its coding efficiency. Statistically, the decoder can automatically recover the lost synchronization with the shortest error propagation length. Experimental results show that fast synchronization recovery reduces quality degradation on the reconstructed image while maintaining the same coding efficiency.