A Knowledge Base Driven Task-Oriented Image Semantic Communication Scheme

Abstract

With the development of artificial intelligence and computer hardware, semantic communication has been attracting great interest. As an emerging communication paradigm, semantic communication can reduce the requirement for channel bandwidth by extracting semantic information. This is an effective method that can be applied to image acquisition of unmanned aerial vehicles, which can transmit high-data-volume images within the constraints of limited available bandwidth. However, the existing semantic communication schemes fail to adequately incorporate the guidance of task requirements into the semantic communication process and are difficult to adapt to the dynamic changes of tasks. A task-oriented image semantic communication scheme driven by knowledge base is proposed, aiming at achieving high compression ratio and high quality image reconstruction, and effectively solving the bandwidth limitation. This scheme segments the input image into several semantic information unit under the guidance of task requirements by Yolo-World and Segment Anything Model. The assigned bandwidth for each unit is according to the task relevance scores, which enables high-quality transmission of task-related information with lower communication overheads. An improved metric weighted learned perceptual image patch similarity (LPIPS) is proposed to evaluate the transmission accuracy of the novel scheme. Experimental results show that our scheme achieves a notable performance improvement on weighted LPIPS while the same compression ratio compared with traditional image compression schemes. Our scheme has a higher target capture ratio than traditional image compression schemes under the task of target detection.