AbstractThis paper investigates the effects of noise‐induced transmission errors on the performance of compression coding methods for still pictures. The following four coding methods are considered: (1) adaptive cosine transform coding; (2) DPCM coding; (3) adaptive block coding; and (4) vector quantization coding. First, the relations among the bit error rate, signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR), and code lengths by these coding methods are compared in the case of transmission without error control. Adaptive cosine transform coding and adaptive block coding require control information for adaptivity; therefore, they are investigated with and without transmission errors in the coding control information. Further, transmission with error control is studied for sending control information. Considering the error control methods, both automatic repeat request and forward error correction are considered. In these cases SNR deterioration by transmission noise beyond error correction capability and the amount of additional data required for error detection/correction or retransmission are examined. BCH codes are used for error detection and corre