Semantic Communication in Vehicular Networks: A Multi-Modal Approach for Faithful Image Transmission

Semantic communication (SC) has emerged as a promising paradigm to address the bandwidth limitations of traditional wireless communication systems by transmitting only the essential meaning of data. This paper investigates an advanced SC framework for vehicular communication, employing diverse feature extraction techniques to encode multi-modal information, such as textual descriptions, object poses, semantic segmentation, and sketches, into compact semantic representations. These semantic encoders are evaluated based on their output size, faithfulness of reconstruction, and resilience to data loss. The proposed system model considers vehicular communication scenarios where vehicles transmit important information extracted from camera-collected data to other vehicles and road users, in bandwidth-constrained environments. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed SC framework, with a reconstruction performance reaching 17.24 in Fréchet Inception distance (FID) and a an RMSE equal to 0.029 between the transmitted image and the reconstructed one. This performance is achieved while the data saving between the size of the original image and the transmitted semantics is equal to <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\text{9 2. 2 5 \%}$</tex>.