This paper proposes a joint source-channel coding scheme for transmission of aerial remote sensing image.After the image has been wavelet transformed
the wavelet trees are divided into independently decodable groups to produce multiple descriptions
and coefficients in the low-low band are repeated by two descriptions due to their significance.Each description is compressed separately by a modified set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) encoder and unequally protected.To meet realtime performance
a fast rate-allocation algorithm is proposed.Experiment results show that our system achieves robust image transmission over Rician frequency-selective fading channels with low complexity.