Use of residual redundancy in the design of joint source/channel coders

A technique for providing error protection without the additional overhead required for channel coding is developed, starting from the premise that, during source coder design, for the sake of simplicity or due to imperfect knowledge, assumptions have to be made about the source which are often incorrect. This results in residual redundancy at the output of the source coder. The residual redundancy can then be used to provide error protection in much the same way as the insertion of redundancy in convolutional coding provides error protection. To show the validity of this approach, it is applied to image coding using differential pulse code modulation (DPCM). Substantial performance gains are obtained, in terms of both objective and subjective measures.