Generative joint source-channel coding for semantic image transmission
File(s)ETDG_JSAC23.pdf (12.19 MB)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Erdemir, Ecenaz
Tung, Tze-Yang
Dragotti, Pier Luigi
Gündüz, Deniz
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Recent works have shown that joint source-channel coding (JSCC) schemes using deep neural networks (DNNs), called DeepJSCC, provide promising results in wireless image transmission. However, these methods mostly focus on the distortion of the reconstructed signals with respect to the input image, rather than their perception by humans. However, focusing on traditional distortion metrics alone does not necessarily result in high perceptual quality, especially in extreme physical conditions, such as very low bandwidth compression ratio (BCR) and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes. In this work, we propose two novel JSCC schemes that leverage the perceptual quality of deep generative models (DGMs) for wireless image transmission, namely InverseJSCC and GenerativeJSCC. While the former is an inverse problem approach to DeepJSCC, the latter is an end-to-end optimized JSCC scheme. In both, we optimize a weighted sum of mean squared error (MSE) and learned perceptual image patch similarity (LPIPS) losses, which capture more semantic similarities than other distortion metrics. InverseJSCC performs denoising on the distorted reconstructions of a DeepJSCC model by solving an inverse optimization problem using the pre-trained style-based generative adversarial network (StyleGAN). Our simulation results show that InverseJSCC significantly improves the state-of-the-art DeepJSCC in terms of perceptual quality in edge cases. In GenerativeJSCC, we carry out end-to-end training of an encoder and a StyleGAN-based decoder, and show that GenerativeJSCC significantly outperforms DeepJSCC both in terms of distortion and perceptual quality.
Date Issued
2023-08
Date Acceptance
2023-06-01
Citation
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 2023, 41 (8), pp.2645-2657
ISSN
0733-8716
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Start Page
2645
End Page
2657
Journal / Book Title
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
Volume
41
Issue
8
Copyright Statement
Copyright © 2023 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to use this material for any other purposes must be obtained from the IEEE by sending a request to pubs-permissions@ieee.org. The author has applied a ’Creative Commons Attribution’ (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising.
License URL
Identifier
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10158995
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2023-06-21