Lightweight Low-SNR-Robust Semantic Communication System for Autonomous Driving
This addresses resource and robustness challenges in vehicle-to-vehicle communication for autonomous driving, representing an incremental improvement over existing semantic communication methods.
The paper tackles image transmission for autonomous driving by proposing a lightweight deep joint source-channel coding system that reduces model parameters by over half while maintaining performance and robustness, especially under low SNR conditions.
Image transmission for vehicle-to-vehicle collaborative perception in autonomous driving faces challenges including limited on-board terminal resources, time-varying wireless channel fading, and poor robustness under low signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio. Traditional separate source-channel coding schemes suffer from the cliff effect, while existing semantic communication models are limited by large parameter sizes and weak digital compatibility. This paper proposes a lightweight, low-SNR-robust deep joint source-channel coding (JSCC) semantic communication system. First, structured pruning is implemented based on batch normalization layer scaling factors and L1 regularization, which significantly reduces model complexity while ensuring image reconstruction quality. Second, a uniform quantization and M-QAM modulation scheme adapted to JSCC features is designed, and a training-deployment separation strategy is adopted to address the non-differentiable quantization problem, enabling compatibility with existing digital communication systems. Simulation results on the Cityscapes dataset show that the pruned model maintains comparable performance and robustness to the original one, even with over half of its parameters removed. Notably, the proposed scheme exhibits significant advantages over conventional communication methods under low SNR conditions.