Bi-directional packing of compressed multimedia data for improved error resiliency

Most data compression schemes split the input signal into blocks and then produce a variable length code for each block. Since variable length codes are highly sensitive to channel errors that may occur during transmission, synchronization code words are often inserted between blocks to provide occasional resynchronization thereby adding more redundant bits of data.

Error-resilient entropy coding (EREC) is a method of adapting existing schemes to give increased resilience to random and burst errors while maintaining high compression. This report proposes improvements to the EREC algorithm to increase its error resiliency. The objective is to pack code blocks in fixed-size slots, so that in the presence of bit errors, more data (blocks) can be recovered than is possible with the original EREC method of packing.