Information unequal error protection using polar codes

Unequal error protection (UEP) divides the data into different levels of importance in order to ensure that the most important parts of the source information have more protection than the less important parts. In this study, the authors investigate the application of UEP using polar codes and propose a technique that utilises the channel polarisation property of these codes to achieve UEP without any significant modification. They demonstrate the error bounds of the proposed technique particularly within the context of JPEG2000. In addition, they propose a joint source-channel decoding method that is based on iterative decoding. This method takes the advantage of the error resilience tools that already exist in the JPEG2000 decoder. It will be shown that the proposed technique offers better performance than the conventional transmission with equal error protection.