A Hybrid Wireless Image Transmission Scheme with Diffusion

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid wireless image transmission scheme combining traditional digital methods with generative diffusion techniques, enhancing perceptual quality and bandwidth efficiency in noisy channels.

Contribution

It presents a novel joint source-channel coding scheme that integrates diffusion-based generative refinement with conventional digital transmission for improved image reconstruction.

Findings

Bandwidth savings achieved

Graceful performance improvement with channel quality

Enhanced perceptual quality of reconstructed images

Abstract

We propose a hybrid joint source-channel coding (JSCC) scheme, in which the conventional digital communication scheme is complemented with a generative refinement component to improve the perceptual quality of the reconstruction. The input image is decomposed into two components: the first is a coarse compressed version, and is transmitted following the conventional separation based approach. An additional component is obtained through the diffusion process by adding independent Gaussian noise to the input image, and is transmitted using DeepJSCC. The decoder combines the two signals to produce a high quality reconstruction of the source. Experimental results show that the hybrid design provides bandwidth savings and enables graceful performance improvement as the channel quality improves.