This work describes a method for providing robustness to errors from a binary symmetric channel for the SPIHT image compression. The source rate and channel rate are jointly optimized by a stream of fixed-size channel packets. Punctured turbo codes are used for the channel coding, providing stronger error protection than previously available codes. We use a subset of the puncturing patterns that are well chosen and that leads to the best source rate. The rate allocation scheme presented obtains all necessary information from the SPIHT encoder, and does not require image decompression.