We consider the problem of joint source-channel coding with distortion and perception constraints from a rateless perspective, the purpose of which is to settle the balance between reliability (distortion/perception) and effectiveness (rate) of transmission over uncertain channels. We find a new finite-blocklength bound for the achievable joint source-channel code rate with the above two constraints. To achieve a superior rateless characteristic of JSCC coding, we perform multi-level optimization on various finite-blocklength codes. Based on these two, we then propose a new JSCC coding scheme called rateless stochastic coding (RSC). We experimentally demonstrate that the proposed RSC can achieve variable rates of transmission maintaining an excellent trade-off between distortion and perception.

翻译：本文从无速率编码的角度研究了具有失真与感知约束的联合信源信道编码问题，旨在解决不确定信道传输中可靠性（失真/感知）与有效性（速率）之间的平衡问题。我们推导了在上述两种约束下可实现的联合信源信道编码速率在有限码长条件下的新界。为实现更优的JSCC编码无速率特性，我们对多种有限码长编码进行了多层级优化。基于以上两点，我们提出了一种称为无速率随机编码的新型JSCC编码方案。实验结果表明，所提出的RSC能够实现可变传输速率，并在失真与感知之间保持优异的权衡关系。