A novel Joint Source and Channel Decoding (JSCD) scheme for Variable Length Codes (VLCs) concatenated with turbo codes utilizing a new super-trellis decoding algorithm is presented in this letter. The basic idea of our decoding algorithm is that source a priori information with the form of bit transition probabilities corresponding to the VLC tree can be derived directly from sub-state transitions in new composite-state represented super-trellis. A Maximum Likelihood (ML) decoding algorithm for VLC sequence estimations based on the proposed super-trellis is also described. Simu-lation results show that the new iterative decoding scheme can obtain obvious encoding gain especially for Reversible Variable Length Codes (RVLCs),when compared with the classical separated turbo decoding and the previous joint decoding not considering source statistical characteristics.
