Implementation of a robust transmission system for astronomical images over error-prone links

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is expected to produce a vast amount of images that are valuable for astronomical research and education. To support research activities related to the mission, the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) has provided funds to establish the Structures Pointing and Control Engineering (SPACE) Laboratory at the California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA). One of the research activities in SPACE lab is to design and implement an effective and efficient transmission system to disseminate JWST images across networks. In on our previous research, a prioritized transmission method was proposed to provide the best quality of the transferred image based on the joint-optimization of content-based retransmission and error concealment. In this paper, the design and implementation of a robust transmission system is presented to utilize our previously proposed methods over error-prone links. The implemented system includes three parts. First, a zero-tree based error-resilient wavelet codec is used to compress the incoming astronomical image at the sender. Tree-based interleaving is adopted in packetization to increase the system's capability to combat burst losses in error-prone channels. Second, various error concealment approaches are investigated and implemented at the receiver to improve the quality of the reconstructed image. The transmission system uses UDP as the transport protocol, but with an error control module to incorporate the optimal retransmission with the delay constraint. A user-friendly graphical interface is designed to allow easy usage for users of diverse backgrounds.