Transmit What You Need: Task-Adaptive Semantic Communications for Visual Information

TL;DR

This paper proposes a task-adaptive semantic communication framework for visual information, optimizing the transmission of visual semantics based on task complexity to enhance throughput and efficiency in wireless channels.

Contribution

It introduces a novel task-adaptive semantic selection method and a filtering technique for scene graphs, significantly improving transmission efficiency for visual tasks.

Findings

Over 45 times higher throughput compared to raw data transmission

Effective filtering reduces redundant scene graph information

Task-specific semantic transmission improves wireless communication efficiency

Abstract

Recently, semantic communications have drawn great attention as the groundbreaking concept surpasses the limited capacity of Shannon's theory. Specifically, semantic communications probably become crucial in realizing visual tasks that demand massive network traffic. Although highly distinctive forms of visual semantics exist for computer vision tasks, a thorough investigation of what visual semantics can be transmitted in time and which one is required for completing different visual tasks has not yet been reported. To this end, we first scrutinize the achievable throughput in transmitting existing visual semantics through the limited wireless communication bandwidth. In addition, we further demonstrate the resulting performance of various visual tasks for each visual semantic. Based on the empirical testing, we suggest a task-adaptive selection of visual semantics is crucial for real-time semantic communications for visual tasks, where we transmit basic semantics (e.g., objects in the given image) for simple visual tasks, such as classification, and richer semantics (e.g., scene graphs) for complex tasks, such as image regeneration. To further improve transmission efficiency, we suggest a filtering method for scene graphs, which drops redundant information in the scene graph, thus allowing the sending of essential semantics for completing the given task. We confirm the efficacy of our task-adaptive semantic communication approach through extensive simulations in wireless channels, showing more than 45 times larger throughput over a naive transmission of original data. Our work can be reproduced at the following source codes: https://github.com/jhpark2024/jhpark.github.io