Efficient quantization with linear index coding for deep-space images

Due to inevitable propagation delay involved in deep-space communication systems, very high cost is associated with the retransmission of erroneous segments. Quantization with linear index coding (QLIC) scheme is known to provide compression along with robust transmission of deep-space images, and thus the likelihood of retransmissions is significantly reduced. This paper aims to improve its spectral efficiency as well as robustness. First, multiple quantization refinement levels per transmitted source block of QLIC are proposed to increase spectral efficiency. Then, iterative multipass decoding is introduced to jointly decode the subsource symbol-planes. It achieves better PSNR of the reconstructed image as compared to the baseline one-pass decoding approach of QLIC.