Arithmetic coding is widely adopted in the state-of-art multimedia compression schemes due to its high coding efficiency.Unfortunately

arithmetic codes are extremely vulnerable to channel errors because of the error propagation property.In this paper

arithmetic decoder is modeled as a finite state machine (FSM)

and a sequential decoding algorithm is contrived by utilizing maximum a-posteriori (MAP) estimation rule.The FSM is responsible for a-priori probability estimation and error detection.Simulations with memoryless sources and JPEG2000 images show that the algorithm improves the system performance with reduced sequence error rate and enhanced quality of reconstructed images.