A joint layered coding scheme for unified reliable and secure media transmission with implementation on JPEG 2000 images

This paper presents a novel stream-level joint layered coding scheme for unified reliable and secure media transmission over wireless networks. The proposed scheme simultaneously protects both compressed media content and the authentication data from wireless channel impairments. Therefore, the media quality degradation incurred by both channel noise and authentication constraints can be minimized. With a prior knowledge of source coding and channel coding, the proposed joint system integrates authentication into the media error protection components to ensure 100% effective verification probability, i.e. every source decodable media unit is authenticable. In particular, by utilizing the contextual relationship, such as coding dependency and content importance between media slices for authentication hash appending, the proposed scheme generates an extremely low authentication overhead. The proposed authentication scheme is fundamentally different from many existing systems that consider the problem of authenticating media content separately from the other operations in the media transmission system. Under this joint layered coding framework, an optimal rate allocation algorithm for source coding, channel coding and media authentication is developed to guarantee the end-to-end media quality. Experiment results on JPEG 2000 images validate the proposed scheme and demonstrate that the performance of the proposed approach is approaching its upper bound, in which case no authentication is applied to the media stream.