Project Notting Hill

Deadline: Mar 27, 2009

Debriefing

Your cohort is broken up into three teams:

Team Alpha
Scott Baker
Jennifer Holt (Team Captain)
Monica McDalton
Rebekah Smith

Team Bravo
James Broda (Team Captain)
David Lamoureux
Billy Smith
Jody Shackford

Team Omega
Riley Abel
Shawn Bass
Ben Harris
Kjell Sawyer
Joe Waterbury (Team Captain)

Task

Your task is to plan a strike on enemy territory. For this, it is crucial that you obtain aerial images, however a flight into this territory is extremely risky. You can expect that a plane sent over will not return, and any transmissions it sends before crashing will be thoroughly garbled (transmitter jammed and/or damaged).

Design (or choose) and program the best code you can assuming you have a binary symmetric channel with error probability P=0.3. For ease of programming, we will work with bitmap images. Here is the image you are to use your code on, and here is code I have written that you may use. Your code may or may not be linear, but the information rate should be no less than 1/6.

First, use the ecc.corruptbmp() function from my code to see what your image looks like without an error-correcting code. Then encode the image, apply the noise with P=0.3 using my ecc.addbscnoise() function (you may skip the header if you wish--either before the encoding or while adding noise--as I do in the corruptbmp function). Then decode the image and compare to the original, and the garbled image without any error-correction.

Analysis

Provide a detailed explanation of why you chose your code and do a theoretical analysis of the expectation probability of a bit error in decoding (along this P=0.3 channel), and compare that with what seems theoretically best possible in this situation (information rate at least 1/6). Write up your analysis including printouts of the images for all codes you may have tried. You are to turn in a typed printed report and email your code to me.

Bonuses

The team to finish first will earn a bonus of 10 points.
The team to finish second will earn a bonus of 5 points.

The team with the best code will earn a bonus of 10 points.
The team with the second best code will earn a bonus of 5 points.


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