  JPEG-XS offers low complexity image compression for applications with
constrained but reasonable bit-rate, and low latency. Our paper explores the
deployment of JPEG-XS on lossy packet networks. To preserve low latency,
Forward Error Correction (FEC) is envisioned as the protection mechanism of
interest. Despite the JPEG-XS codestream is not scalable in essence, we observe
that the loss of a codestream fraction impacts the decoded image quality
differently, depending on whether this codestream fraction corresponds to
codestream headers, to coefficients significance information, or to low/high
frequency data, respectively. Hence, we propose a rate-distortion optimal
unequal error protection scheme that adapts the redundancy level of
Reed-Solomon codes according to the rate of channel losses and the type of
information protected by the code. Our experiments demonstrate that, at 5% loss
rates, it reduces the Mean Squared Error by up to 92% and 65%, compared to a
transmission without and with optimal but equal protection, respectively.
