LineCast: line-based distributed coding and transmission for broadcasting satellite images

In this paper, we propose a novel coding and transmission scheme, called LineCast, for broadcasting satellite images to a large number of receivers. The proposed LineCast matches perfectly with the line scanning cameras that are widely adopted in orbit satellites to capture high-resolution images. On the sender side, each captured line is immediately compressed by a transform-domain scalar modulo quantization. Without syndrome coding, the transmission power is directly allocated to quantized coefficients by scaling the coefficients according to their distributions. Finally, the scaled coefficients are transmitted over a dense constellation. This line-based distributed scheme features low delay, low memory cost, and low complexity. On the receiver side, our proposed line-based prediction is used to generate side information from previously decoded lines, which fully utilizes the correlation among lines. The quantized coefficients are decoded by the linear least square estimator from the received data. The image line is then reconstructed by the scalar modulo dequantization using the generated side information. Since there is neither syndrome coding nor channel coding, the proposed LineCast can make a large number of receivers reach the qualities matching their channel conditions. Our theoretical analysis shows that the proposed LineCast can achieve Shannon’s optimum performance by using a high-dimensional modulo-lattice quantization. Experiments on satellite images demonstrate that it achieves up to 1.9-dB gain over the state-of-the-art 2D broadcasting scheme and a gain of more than 5 dB over JPEG 2000 with forward error correction.