An Image Semantic Communication System Based on GAN and Relative Position-Encoding

In image semantic communication, the complex wireless channel environment leads to the loss of image details and performance degradation during transmission. To address this issue, we propose an image semantic communication system based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and Relative Position-Encoding (RPE), named GAN–RpeSC. Specifically, in the system design, we introduce the GAN network at the output of the semantic communication framework to enhance the image restoration. We integrate the RPE module into the Visual Transformer (ViT) module, adding the RPE module to its Multihead Self Attention (MHSA), so that the model can better capture the spatial location information of the image. Experimental results show that the proposed GAN–RpeSC has significant advantages in improving image transmission quality, with a 0.3 dB improvement in peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) compared to the ViT module alone.