End-to-end quality measure for transmission of compressed imagery over a noisy coded channel

For the transmission of imagery at high data rates over large distances with limited power and system gain, it is usually necessary to compress the data before transmitting it over a noisy channel that uses channel coding to reduce the effect of noise introduced errors. Both compression and channel noise introduce distortion into the imagery. In order to design a communication link that provides adequate quality of received images, it is necessary first to define some suitable distortion measure that accounts for both these kinds of distortion and then to perform various tradeoffs to arrive at system parameter values that will provide a sufficiently low level of received image distortion. The overall mean square error is used as the distortion measure and a description of how to perform these tradeoffs are included.