SPIHT coded image transmission over underwater acoustic channel with unequal error protection using HQAM

Set Partitioning in Hierarchical Trees (SPIHT) is an efficient wavelet-based progressive image-compression technique, designed to minimize the mean-squared error (MSE) between the original and decoded imagery. Since underwater acoustic channel suffer from highly significant bit error rates, some mechanism to protect the encoded image required. In this paper we present Reed Solomon channel coder combined with Hierarchical Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (HQAM) as unequal error protection technique to protect the transmitted sensitive coded bits. This paper proved that Reed Solomon channel coding combined with HQAM method can reduced sensitive bit error for SPHIT coded image to transmit over underwater acoustic channel. Proposed scheme is evaluated using different types of images for different values of the modulation parameter and different underwater channel physical parameters.