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A high bit rate acoustic link for underwater video transmission is examined. Currently, encoding standards support video transmission at bit rates as low as 64 kbps. While this rate is still above the limit of commercially available acoustic modems, prototype acoustic modems based on phase coherent modulation/detection have demonstrated successful transmission at 30 kbps over a deep water channel. The key to bridging the remaining gap between the bit-rate needed for video transmission and that supported by the acoustic channel lies in two approaches: use of efficient image/video compression algorithms and use of high-level bandwidth-efficient modulation methods. An experimental system, based on discrete cosine transform (DCT) and Huffman entropy coding for image compression, and variable rate M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) was implemented. Phase-coherent equalization is accomplished by joint operation of a decision feedback equalizer (DFE) and a second order phase locked loo