Robust Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding for Video Transmission over Multipath Fading Channel

TL;DR

This paper introduces a robust deep joint source-channel coding framework for wireless video transmission over multipath fading channels, combining tailored OFDM, advanced coding, and denoising to improve quality and robustness.

Contribution

It presents a novel integrated framework that enhances video transmission robustness by combining OFDM, conditional contextual coding, and denoising modules, outperforming existing methods.

Findings

Achieves an average of 5.13 dB quality gain over state-of-the-art methods.

Effectively mitigates frequency-selective fading with tailored OFDM.

Improves reconstruction quality under strict bandwidth constraints.

Abstract

To address the challenges of wireless video transmission over multipath fading channels, we propose a robust deep joint source-channel coding (DeepJSCC) framework by effectively exploiting temporal redundancy and incorporating robust innovations at the modulation, coding, and decoding stages. At the modulation stage, tailored orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for robust video transmission is employed, decomposing wideband signals into orthogonal frequency-flat sub-channels to effectively mitigate frequency-selective fading. At the coding stage, conditional contextual coding with multi-scale Gaussian warped features is introduced to efficiently model temporal redundancy, significantly improving reconstruction quality under strict bandwidth constraints. At the decoding stage, a lightweight denoising module is integrated to robustly simplify signal restoration and accelerate convergence, addressing the suboptimality and slow convergence typically associated with simultaneously performing channel estimation, equalization, and semantic reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed robust framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art video DeepJSCC methods, achieving an average reconstruction quality gain of 5.13 dB under challenging multipath fading channel conditions.