Bandwidth-Agile Image Transmission with Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding
File(s)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Kurka, David Burth
Gunduz, Deniz
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
We propose deep learning based communication methods for adaptive-bandwidth transmission of images over wireless channels. We consider the scenario in which images are transmitted progressively in layers over time or frequency, and such layers can be aggregated by receivers in order to increase the quality of their reconstructions. We investigate two scenarios, one in which the layers are sent sequentially, and incrementally contribute to the refinement of a reconstruction, and another in which the layers are independent and can be retrieved in any order. Those scenarios correspond to the well known problems of successive refinement and multiple descriptions, respectively, in the context of joint source-channel coding (JSCC). We propose DeepJSCC-l, an innovative solution that uses convolutional autoencoders, and present three architectures with different complexity trade-offs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first practical multiple-description JSCC scheme developed and tested for practical information sources and channels. Numerical results show that DeepJSCC-l can learn to transmit the source progressively with negligible losses in the end-to-end performance compared with a single transmission. Moreover, DeepJSCC-l has comparable performance with state of the art digital progressive transmission schemes in the challenging low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and small bandwidth regimes, with the additional advantage of graceful degradation with channel SNR.
Date Issued
2021-06-24
Date Acceptance
2021-06-01
Citation
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 2021, 20 (12), pp.1-1
ISSN
1536-1276
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Start Page
1
End Page
1
Journal / Book Title
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
Volume
20
Issue
12
Copyright Statement
© 2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Sponsor
Commission of the European Communities
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC)
Identifier
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9464731
Grant Number
677854
EP/T023600/1
Subjects
Science & Technology
Technology
Engineering, Electrical & Electronic
Telecommunications
Engineering
Image transmission
joint source-channel coding
multiple description coding
successive refinement
wireless communication
SUCCESSIVE REFINEMENT
MULTIPLE
DESIGN
cs.IT
cs.IT
cs.LG
eess.IV
eess.SP
math.IT
Networking & Telecommunications
0805 Distributed Computing
0906 Electrical and Electronic Engineering
1005 Communications Technologies
Publication Status
Published