  Some state-of-art multimedia source encoders produce embedded source bit
streams that upon the reliable reception of only a fraction of the total bit
stream, the decoder is able reconstruct the source up to a basic quality.
Reliable reception of later source bits gradually improve the reconstruction
quality. Examples include scalable extensions of H.264/AVC and progressive
image coders such as JPEG2000. To provide an efficient protection for embedded
source bit streams, a concatenated block coding scheme using a minimum mean
distortion criterion was considered in the past. Although, the original design
was shown to achieve better mean distortion characteristics than previous
studies, the proposed coding structure was leading to dramatic quality
fluctuations. In this paper, a modification of the original design is first
presented and then the second order statistics of the distortion is taken into
account in the optimization. More specifically, an extension scheme is proposed
using a minimum distortion variance optimization criterion. This robust system
design is tested for an image transmission scenario. Numerical results show
that the proposed extension achieves significantly lower variance than the
original design, while showing similar mean distortion performance using both
convolutional codes and low density parity check codes.
