A survey on semantic communications:Technologies,solutions,applications and challenges

Semantic Communication(SC)has emerged as a novel communication paradigm that provides a receiver with meaningful information extracted from the source to maximize information transmission throughput in wireless networks,beyond the theoretical capacity limit.Despite the extensive research on SC,there is a lack of comprehensive survey on technologies,solutions,applications,and challenges for SC.In this article,the development of SC is first reviewed and its characteristics,architecture,and advantages are summarized.Next,key technologies such as semantic extraction,semantic encoding,and semantic segmentation are discussed and their corresponding solutions in terms of efficiency,robustness,adaptability,and reliability are summarized.Applications of SC to UAV communication,remote image sensing and fusion,intelligent transportation,and healthcare are also presented and their strategies are summarized.Finally,some challenges and future research directions are presented to provide guidance for further research of SC.

基于Semantic Turkey的主题词表及本体构建应用研究

主题词表及本体是语义化知识管理系统的基础数据支撑,对领域知识的语义化组织及知识图谱的构建具有重要意义。在建设公共危机案例知识集成平台的过程中,采用开源软件Semantic Turkey开发主题词表及本体构建功能,并在此基础上实现规范数据录入、词表导航、知识映射等功能,从而支持进一步的语义检索和知识推理。构建的主题词表及本体模型基于语义网标准与技术,具有良好的规范性和互操作性。开源软件Semantic Turkey提供了功能完备的应用程序编程接口,与完全自主开发相比,降低了开发成本,缩短了开发时间,为语义化知识管理系统的开发工作提供新思路和参考依据。

Information-Theoretic Limits on Compression of Semantic Information

As conventional communication systems based on classic information theory have closely approached Shannon capacity,semantic communication is emerging as a key enabling technology for the further improvement of communication performance.However,it is still unsettled on how to represent semantic information and characterise the theoretical limits of semantic-oriented compression and transmission.In this paper,we consider a semantic source which is characterised by a set of correlated random variables whose joint probabilistic distribution can be described by a Bayesian network.We give the information-theoretic limit on the lossless compression of the semantic source and introduce a low complexity encoding method by exploiting the conditional independence.We further characterise the limits on lossy compression of the semantic source and the upper and lower bounds of the rate-distortion function.We also investigate the lossy compression of the semantic source with two-sided information at the encoder and decoder,and obtain the corresponding rate distortion function.We prove that the optimal code of the semantic source is the combination of the optimal codes of each conditional independent set given the side information.

Multi-User Semantic Fusion for Semantic Communications over Degraded Broadcast Channels

Degraded broadcast channels(DBC) are a typical multiuser communication scenario, Semantic communications over DBC still lack in-depth research. In this paper, we design a semantic communications approach based on multi-user semantic fusion for wireless image transmission over DBC. The transmitter extracts semantic features for two users separately and then effectively fuses them for broadcasting by leveraging semantic similarity. Unlike traditional allocation of time, power, or bandwidth, the semantic fusion scheme can dynamically control the weight of the semantic features of the two users to balance their performance. Considering the different channel state information(CSI) of both users over DBC,a DBC-Aware method is developed that embeds the CSI of both users into the joint source-channel coding encoder and fusion module to adapt to the channel.Experimental results show that the proposed system outperforms the traditional broadcasting schemes.

Semantic segmentation-based semantic communication system for image transmission

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence and the widespread use of the Internet of Things, semantic communication, as an emerging communication paradigm, has been attracting great interest. Taking image transmission as an example, from the semantic communication's view, not all pixels in the images are equally important for certain receivers. The existing semantic communication systems directly perform semantic encoding and decoding on the whole image, in which the region of interest cannot be identified. In this paper, we propose a novel semantic communication system for image transmission that can distinguish between Regions Of Interest (ROI) and Regions Of Non-Interest (RONI) based on semantic segmentation, where a semantic segmentation algorithm is used to classify each pixel of the image and distinguish ROI and RONI. The system also enables high-quality transmission of ROI with lower communication overheads by transmissions through different semantic communication networks with different bandwidth requirements. An improved metric θPSNR is proposed to evaluate the transmission accuracy of the novel semantic transmission network. Experimental results show that our proposed system achieves a significant performance improvement compared with existing approaches, namely, existing semantic communication approaches and the conventional approach without semantics.

A highly reliable encoding and decoding communication framework based on semantic information

Increasing research has focused on semantic communication,the goal of which is to convey accurately the meaning instead of transmitting symbols from the sender to the receiver.In this paper,we design a novel encoding and decoding semantic communication framework,which adopts the semantic information and the contextual correlations between items to optimize the performance of a communication system over various channels.On the sender side,the average semantic loss caused by the wrong detection is defined,and a semantic source encoding strategy is developed to minimize the average semantic loss.To further improve communication reliability,a decoding strategy that utilizes the semantic and the context information to recover messages is proposed in the receiver.Extensive simulation results validate the superior performance of our strategies over state-of-the-art semantic coding and decoding policies on different communication channels.

Part-Whole Relational Few-Shot 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation

This paper focuses on the task of few-shot 3D point cloud semantic segmentation.Despite some progress,this task still encounters many issues due to the insufficient samples given,e.g.,incomplete object segmentation and inaccurate semantic discrimination.To tackle these issues,we first leverage part-whole relationships into the task of 3D point cloud semantic segmentation to capture semantic integrity,which is empowered by the dynamic capsule routing with the module of 3D Capsule Networks(CapsNets)in the embedding network.Concretely,the dynamic routing amalgamates geometric information of the 3D point cloud data to construct higher-level feature representations,which capture the relationships between object parts and their wholes.Secondly,we designed a multi-prototype enhancement module to enhance the prototype discriminability.Specifically,the single-prototype enhancement mechanism is expanded to the multi-prototype enhancement version for capturing rich semantics.Besides,the shot-correlation within the category is calculated via the interaction of different samples to enhance the intra-category similarity.Ablation studies prove that the involved part-whole relations and proposed multi-prototype enhancement module help to achieve complete object segmentation and improve semantic discrimination.Moreover,under the integration of these two modules,quantitative and qualitative experiments on two public benchmarks,including S3DIS and ScanNet,indicate the superior performance of the proposed framework on the task of 3D point cloud semantic segmentation,compared to some state-of-the-art methods.

CrossFormer Embedding DeepLabv3+ for Remote Sensing Images Semantic Segmentation

High-resolution remote sensing image segmentation is a challenging task. In urban remote sensing, the presenceof occlusions and shadows often results in blurred or invisible object boundaries, thereby increasing the difficultyof segmentation. In this paper, an improved network with a cross-region self-attention mechanism for multi-scalefeatures based onDeepLabv3+is designed to address the difficulties of small object segmentation and blurred targetedge segmentation. First,we use CrossFormer as the backbone feature extraction network to achieve the interactionbetween large- and small-scale features, and establish self-attention associations between features at both large andsmall scales to capture global contextual feature information. Next, an improved atrous spatial pyramid poolingmodule is introduced to establish multi-scale feature maps with large- and small-scale feature associations, andattention vectors are added in the channel direction to enable adaptive adjustment of multi-scale channel features.The proposed networkmodel is validated using the PotsdamandVaihingen datasets. The experimental results showthat, compared with existing techniques, the network model designed in this paper can extract and fuse multiscaleinformation, more clearly extract edge information and small-scale information, and segment boundariesmore smoothly. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate the superiority of ourmethod compared withseveral state-of-the-art networks.

Using ontology and rules to retrieve the semantics of disaster remote sensing data

Remote sensing data plays an important role in natural disaster management.However,with the increase of the variety and quantity of remote sensors,the problem of“knowledge barriers”arises when data users in disaster field retrieve remote sensing data.To improve this problem,this paper proposes an ontology and rule based retrieval(ORR)method to retrieve disaster remote sensing data,and this method introduces ontology technology to express earthquake disaster and remote sensing knowledge,on this basis,and realizes the task suitability reasoning of earthquake disaster remote sensing data,mining the semantic relationship between remote sensing metadata and disasters.The prototype system is built according to the ORR method,which is compared with the traditional method,using the ORR method to retrieve disaster remote sensing data can reduce the knowledge requirements of data users in the retrieval process and improve data retrieval efficiency.

Extended context-based semantic communication system for text transmission

Context information is significant for semantic extraction and recovery of messages in semantic communication.However,context information is not fully utilized in the existing semantic communication systems since re-lationships between sentences are often ignored.In this paper,we propose an Extended Context-based Semantic Communication(ECSC)system for text transmission,in which context information within and between sentences is explored for semantic representation and recovery.At the encoder,self-attention and segment-level relative attention are used to extract context information within and between sentences,respectively.In addition,a gate mechanism is adopted at the encoder to incorporate the context information from different ranges.At the decoder,Transformer-XL is introduced to obtain more semantic information from the historical communication processes for semantic recovery.Simulation results show the effectiveness of our proposed model in improving the semantic accuracy between transmitted and recovered messages under various channel conditions.

A Deep Learning Based Broadcast Approach for Image Semantic Communication over Fading Channels

We consider an image semantic communication system in a time-varying fading Gaussian MIMO channel,with a finite number of channel states.A deep learning-aided broadcast approach scheme is proposed to benefit the adaptive semantic transmission in terms of different channel states.We combine the classic broadcast approach with the image transformer to implement this adaptive joint source and channel coding(JSCC)scheme.Specifically,we utilize the neural network(NN)to jointly optimize the hierarchical image compression and superposition code mapping within this scheme.The learned transformers and codebooks allow recovering of the image with an adaptive quality and low error rate at the receiver side,in each channel state.The simulation results exhibit our proposed scheme can dynamically adapt the coding to the current channel state and outperform some existing intelligent schemes with the fixed coding block.

Variational Learned Talking-Head Semantic Coded Transmission System

Video transmission requires considerable bandwidth,and current widely employed schemes prove inadequate when confronted with scenes featuring prominently.Motivated by the strides in talkinghead generative technology,the paper introduces a semantic transmission system tailored for talking-head videos.The system captures semantic information from talking-head video and faithfully reconstructs source video at the receiver,only one-shot reference frame and compact semantic features are required for the entire transmission.Specifically,we analyze video semantics in the pixel domain frame-by-frame and jointly process multi-frame semantic information to seamlessly incorporate spatial and temporal information.Variational modeling is utilized to evaluate the diversity of importance among group semantics,thereby guiding bandwidth resource allocation for semantics to enhance system efficiency.The whole endto-end system is modeled as an optimization problem and equivalent to acquiring optimal rate-distortion performance.We evaluate our system on both reference frame and video transmission,experimental results demonstrate that our system can improve the efficiency and robustness of communications.Compared to the classical approaches,our system can save over 90%of bandwidth when user perception is close.

Depressive semantic awareness from vlog facial and vocal streams via spatio-temporal transformer

With the rapid growth of information transmission via the Internet,efforts have been made to reduce network load to promote efficiency.One such application is semantic computing,which can extract and process semantic communication.Social media has enabled users to share their current emotions,opinions,and life events through their mobile devices.Notably,people suffering from mental health problems are more willing to share their feelings on social networks.Therefore,it is necessary to extract semantic information from social media(vlog data)to identify abnormal emotional states to facilitate early identification and intervention.Most studies do not consider spatio-temporal information when fusing multimodal information to identify abnormal emotional states such as depression.To solve this problem,this paper proposes a spatio-temporal squeeze transformer method for the extraction of semantic features of depression.First,a module with spatio-temporal data is embedded into the transformer encoder,which is utilized to obtain a representation of spatio-temporal features.Second,a classifier with a voting mechanism is designed to encourage the model to classify depression and non-depression effec-tively.Experiments are conducted on the D-Vlog dataset.The results show that the method is effective,and the accuracy rate can reach 70.70%.This work provides scaffolding for future work in the detection of affect recognition in semantic communication based on social media vlog data.

Building Semantic Communication System via Molecules:An End-to-End Training Approach

The concept of semantic communication provides a novel approach for applications in scenarios with limited communication resources.In this paper,we propose an end-to-end(E2E)semantic molecular communication system,aiming to enhance the efficiency of molecular communication systems by reducing the transmitted information.Specifically,following the joint source channel coding paradigm,the network is designed to encode the task-relevant information into the concentration of the information molecules,which is robust to the degradation of the molecular communication channel.Furthermore,we propose a channel network to enable the E2E learning over the non-differentiable molecular channel.Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the semantic molecular communication system over the conventional methods in classification tasks.

A semantic segmentation-based underwater acoustic image transmission framework for cooperative SLAM

With the development of underwater sonar detection technology,simultaneous localization and mapping(SLAM)approach has attracted much attention in underwater navigation field in recent years.But the weak detection ability of a single vehicle limits the SLAM performance in wide areas.Thereby,cooperative SLAM using multiple vehicles has become an important research direction.The key factor of cooperative SLAM is timely and efficient sonar image transmission among underwater vehicles.However,the limited bandwidth of underwater acoustic channels contradicts a large amount of sonar image data.It is essential to compress the images before transmission.Recently,deep neural networks have great value in image compression by virtue of the powerful learning ability of neural networks,but the existing sonar image compression methods based on neural network usually focus on the pixel-level information without the semantic-level information.In this paper,we propose a novel underwater acoustic transmission scheme called UAT-SSIC that includes semantic segmentation-based sonar image compression(SSIC)framework and the joint source-channel codec,to improve the accuracy of the semantic information of the reconstructed sonar image at the receiver.The SSIC framework consists of Auto-Encoder structure-based sonar image compression network,which is measured by a semantic segmentation network's residual.Considering that sonar images have the characteristics of blurred target edges,the semantic segmentation network used a special dilated convolution neural network(DiCNN)to enhance segmentation accuracy by expanding the range of receptive fields.The joint source-channel codec with unequal error protection is proposed that adjusts the power level of the transmitted data,which deal with sonar image transmission error caused by the serious underwater acoustic channel.Experiment results demonstrate that our method preserves more semantic information,with advantages over existing methods at the same compression ratio.It also improves the error tolerance and packet loss resistance of transmission.

Enhancing Deep Learning Semantics:The Diffusion Sampling and Label-Driven Co-Attention Approach

The advent of self-attention mechanisms within Transformer models has significantly propelled the advancement of deep learning algorithms,yielding outstanding achievements across diverse domains.Nonetheless,self-attention mechanisms falter when applied to datasets with intricate semantic content and extensive dependency structures.In response,this paper introduces a Diffusion Sampling and Label-Driven Co-attention Neural Network(DSLD),which adopts a diffusion sampling method to capture more comprehensive semantic information of the data.Additionally,themodel leverages the joint correlation information of labels and data to introduce the computation of text representation,correcting semantic representationbiases in thedata,andincreasing the accuracyof semantic representation.Ultimately,the model computes the corresponding classification results by synthesizing these rich data semantic representations.Experiments on seven benchmark datasets show that our proposed model achieves competitive results compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Variational Neural Inference Enhanced Text Semantic Communication System

Recently,deep learning-based semantic communication has garnered widespread attention,with numerous systems designed for transmitting diverse data sources,including text,image,and speech,etc.While efforts have been directed toward improving system performance,many studies have concentrated on enhancing the structure of the encoder and decoder.However,this often overlooks the resulting increase in model complexity,imposing additional storage and computational burdens on smart devices.Furthermore,existing work tends to prioritize explicit semantics,neglecting the potential of implicit semantics.This paper aims to easily and effectively enhance the receiver's decoding capability without modifying the encoder and decoder structures.We propose a novel semantic communication system with variational neural inference for text transmission.Specifically,we introduce a simple but effective variational neural inferer at the receiver to infer the latent semantic information within the received text.This information is then utilized to assist in the decoding process.The simulation results show a significant enhancement in system performance and improved robustness.

An Improved UNet Lightweight Network for Semantic Segmentation of Weed Images in Corn Fields

In cornfields,factors such as the similarity between corn seedlings and weeds and the blurring of plant edge details pose challenges to corn and weed segmentation.In addition,remote areas such as farmland are usually constrained by limited computational resources and limited collected data.Therefore,it becomes necessary to lighten the model to better adapt to complex cornfield scene,and make full use of the limited data information.In this paper,we propose an improved image segmentation algorithm based on unet.Firstly,the inverted residual structure is introduced into the contraction path to reduce the number of parameters in the training process and improve the feature extraction ability;secondly,the pyramid pooling module is introduced to enhance the network’s ability of acquiring contextual information as well as the ability of dealing with the small target loss problem;and lastly,Finally,to further enhance the segmentation capability of the model,the squeeze and excitation mechanism is introduced in the expansion path.We used images of corn seedlings collected in the field and publicly available corn weed datasets to evaluate the improved model.The improved model has a total parameter of 3.79 M and miou can achieve 87.9%.The fps on a single 3050 ti video card is about 58.9.The experimental results show that the network proposed in this paper can quickly segment corn weeds in a cornfield scenario with good segmentation accuracy.

A Video Captioning Method by Semantic Topic-Guided Generation

In the video captioning methods based on an encoder-decoder,limited visual features are extracted by an encoder,and a natural sentence of the video content is generated using a decoder.However,this kind ofmethod is dependent on a single video input source and few visual labels,and there is a problem with semantic alignment between video contents and generated natural sentences,which are not suitable for accurately comprehending and describing the video contents.To address this issue,this paper proposes a video captioning method by semantic topic-guided generation.First,a 3D convolutional neural network is utilized to extract the spatiotemporal features of videos during the encoding.Then,the semantic topics of video data are extracted using the visual labels retrieved from similar video data.In the decoding,a decoder is constructed by combining a novel Enhance-TopK sampling algorithm with a Generative Pre-trained Transformer-2 deep neural network,which decreases the influence of“deviation”in the semantic mapping process between videos and texts by jointly decoding a baseline and semantic topics of video contents.During this process,the designed Enhance-TopK sampling algorithm can alleviate a long-tail problem by dynamically adjusting the probability distribution of the predicted words.Finally,the experiments are conducted on two publicly used Microsoft Research Video Description andMicrosoft Research-Video to Text datasets.The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms several state-of-art approaches.Specifically,the performance indicators Bilingual Evaluation Understudy,Metric for Evaluation of Translation with Explicit Ordering,Recall Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation-longest common subsequence,and Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation of the proposed method are improved by 1.2%,0.1%,0.3%,and 2.4% on the Microsoft Research Video Description dataset,and 0.1%,1.0%,0.1%,and 2.8% on the Microsoft Research-Video to Text dataset,respectively,compared with the existing video captioning methods.As a result,the proposed method can generate video captioning that is more closely aligned with human natural language expression habits.

Task-Oriented Semantic Communication with Foundation Models

In the future development direction of the sixth generation(6G)mobile communication,several communication models are proposed to face the growing challenges of the task.The rapid development of artificial intelligence(AI)foundation models provides significant support for efficient and intelligent communication interactions.In this paper,we propose an innovative semantic communication paradigm called task-oriented semantic communication system with foundation models.First,we segment the image by using task prompts based on the segment anything model(SAM)and contrastive language-image pretraining(CLIP).Meanwhile,we adopt Bezier curve to enhance the mask to improve the segmentation accuracy.Second,we have differentiated semantic compression and transmission approaches for segmented content.Third,we fuse different semantic information based on the conditional diffusion model to generate high-quality images that satisfy the users'specific task requirements.Finally,the experimental results show that the proposed system compresses the semantic information effectively and improves the robustness of semantic communication.