To overcome some drawbacks of Viterbi algorithm （VA）, such as exponential growing complexity of decoding, and its poor performance under bad channel conditions, some available known information must be used as constrained condition and apriori knowledge for decoding. A new constrained VA is proposed by adding con- straint bits directly for conventional codec. Compared with the conventional VA, under the bad channel condi- tion, the proposed scheme can improve the peak signal to noise ratio （PSNR） of the decoding image 2--10 dB by changing the number of constrained bits. Experimental results show that it is an efficient error-controlling way for the transmission of set partitioning in hierarchical trees （SPIHT） coded image.
