Nowadays, wireless multimedia applications are experiencing a rapid growth; in this scenario, challenging obstacles, such as packet losses due to congestion and band limitation along with bit-level error corruption, require the design of novel solutions for robust multimedia delivery. New standards for multimedia applications are incorporating many tools for error resilience; as an example, JPEG 2000 part 11 is explicitly devoted to the wireless applications of the image coding standard. In this paper we address a novel multiple description coding technique, based on post-processing rate allocation of embedded bitstreams. The proposed approach is complaint with the JPEG 2000 standard and has the ability to jointly cope with both packet losses and bit errors. Experimental results show that the designed algorithm significantly outperforms other techniques based on unequal error protection by means of RS codes.