Model-Data Dual-Driven Image Semantic Communication for Low-Altitude Scenarios
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1School of Electronic and Information Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510000, China;2Research Institute, Guangzhou Haige Communications Group Incorporated Company, Guangzhou 510000, China;3College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 211106, China

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TN919.8

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    Abstract:

    Low-altitude air-ground communication channels are characterized by time-varying multipath propagation and dynamic switching of line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) components. Traditional pure data-driven joint source-channel coding methods lack physical communication priors, leading to poor image reconstruction robustness and oscillating training convergence. This paper proposes an end-to-end image semantic communication architecture (UP-WITT) with model-data dual-driven design for low-altitude scenarios. Taking the time-domain baseband transmission model of low-altitude time-varying channels as the physical basis, the architecture adopts a two-branch collaborative structure. The data-driven branch employs Swin Transformer as the codec backbone to extract multi-scale global semantic features, which are further mapped into time-domain discrete baseband symbol sequences complying with transmission constraints. Based on projected gradient descent (PGD) theory, the model-driven branch unrolls the iterative optimization process into learnable network layers and constructs a configurable PGD reconstruction module. With the physical prior of time-domain channel transmission, the module performs effective compensation of channel impairments and reduces iterative complexity via frequency-domain fast computation, thereby alleviating the ill-posedness of the inverse problem under the experimental conditions considered. Experimental results on the CIFAR dataset show that compared with pure data-driven baseline models, the proposed method achieves better peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and multi-scale structural similarity (MS-SSIM) under different channel bandwidth ratios (CBRs) and channel conditions. It also exhibits a smoother training convergence process and better reconstruction performance within the trained channel distribution, providing a useful reference for reliable image semantic transmission in low-altitude applications.

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LIU Ren, XIN Li, WANG Shuaijun. Model-Data Dual-Driven Image Semantic Communication for Low-Altitude Scenarios[J]. Journal of Data Acquisition and Processing,2026,41(5):1318-1332.

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History
  • Received:June 08,2026
  • Revised:September 07,2026
  • Adopted:
  • Online: October 14,2026
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