Journal on Communications ›› 2023, Vol. 44 ›› Issue (4): 1-14.doi: 10.11959/j.issn.1000-436x.2023087

• Papers •     Next Articles

Nonlinear transform coding for semantic communications

Ping ZHANG1, Jincheng DAI2, Yuming ZHANG2, Sixian WANG2, Xiaoqi QIN1, Kai NIU1   

  1. 1 The State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China
    2 The Key Laboratory of Universal Wireless Communications, Ministry of Education, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China
  • Revised:2023-04-11 Online:2023-04-01 Published:2023-04-01
  • Supported by:
    The National Natural Science Foundation of China(62293481);The National Natural Science Foundation of China(92067202);The National Natural Science Foundation of China(62001049);The National Natural Science Foundation of China(62071058)

Abstract:

The modular design and limited processing mechanism of traditional communication systems limit the continuous improvement of end-to-end data transmission capability.For this reason, a new nonlinear transform coding framework for semantic communications was proposed.First, an end-to-end rate distortion optimization criterion for semantic communication was derived based on variational theory.Based on this, a nonlinear transform was designed to extract the compact representation of source data in the semantic latent space, and variable-rate nonlinear joint source-channel coding was implemented through the guidance of variational entropy model.Experiments show that semantic nonlinear transform coding can significantly improve the end-to-end data transmission performance and robustness, and is one of the key technologies to catalyze future semantic communications.

Key words: semantic communications, nonlinear transform, nonlinear coding, variational entropy modeling, rate-distortion optimization

CLC Number: 

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