In this paper a novel error resilient MQ coder for reliable JPEG 2000 image delivery is designed. The proposed coder uses a forbidden symbol in order to force a given amount of redundancy in the codestream. At the decoder side, the presence of the forbidden symbol allows for powerful error correction. Moreover the added redundancy can be easily controlled and the proposed coder is kept backward compatible with MQ. In this work excellent improvements in the case of image transmission across both BSC and AWGN channels are obtained by means of a maximum a posteriori estimation technique. ©2004 IEEE.