A constrained joint source/channel coder design

The design of joint source/channel coders in situations where there is residual redundancy at the output of the source coder is examined. It has previously been shown that this residual redundancy can be used to provide error protection without a channel coder. In this paper, this approach is extended to conventional source coder/convolutional coder combinations. A family of nonbinary encoders is developed which more efficiently use the residual redundancy in the source coder output. It is shown through simulation results that the proposed systems outperform conventional source-channel coder pairs with gains of greater than 9 dB in the reconstruction SNR at high probability of error