Codebook organization to enhance maximum a posteriori detection ofprogressive transmission of vector quantized images over noisy channels

We describe a new way to organize a full-search vector quantization codebook so that images encoded with it can be sent progressively and have resilience to channel noise. The codebook organization guarantees that the most significant bits (MSBs) of the codeword index are most important to the overall image quality and are highly correlated. Simulations show that the effective channel error rates of the MSBs can be substantially lowered by implementing a maximum a posteriori (MAP) detector similar to one suggested by Phamdo and Farvardin (see IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, vol.40, no.1, p.156-193, 1994). The performance of the scheme is close to that of pseudo-gray coding at lower bit error rates and outperforms it at higher error rates. No extra bits are used for channel error correction.