WITT: A Wireless Image Transmission Transformer for Semantic Communications

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to redesign the vision Transformer (ViT) as a new backbone to realize semantic image transmission, termed wireless image transmission transformer (WITT). Previous works build upon convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which are inefficient in capturing global dependencies, resulting in degraded end-to-end transmission performance especially for high-resolution images. To tackle this, the proposed WITT employs Swin Transformers as a more capable backbone to extract long-range information. Different from ViTs in image classification tasks, WITT is highly optimized for image transmission while considering the effect of the wireless channel. Specifically, we propose a spatial modulation module to scale the latent representations according to channel state information, which enhances the ability of a single model to deal with various channel conditions. As a result, extensive experiments verify that our WITT attains better performance for different image resolutions, distortion metrics, and channel conditions. The code is available at this https URL.

Publication
IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing
Sixian Wang
Sixian Wang
Ph.D Student

My research focuse on semantic communications, source and channel cod- ing, and computer vision.

Jincheng Dai
Jincheng Dai
Supervisor
Kailin Tan
Kailin Tan
Ph.D Student

My research include semantic communications, source and channel cod- ing, and machine learning.

Kai Niu
Kai Niu
Professor

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