Robust transmission based on variable-rate error control and genetic programming

This letter presents a novel variable-rate error control design algorithm matched to full-search vector quantizers (VQ's) for robust transmission. In the algorithm, different locations of binary strings obtained from VQ encoders are protected by channel codes with different protection levels. The degree of protection at each location is determined by a genetic programming technique minimizing the end-to-end average distortion of transmission systems. The technique outperforms the equal error protection method. Moreover, as compared with full search algorithm for optimal unequal error protection, our technique attains comparable performance with significantly lower computational complexities.