PJSCC: A Puncturing-Based Joint Source Channel Coding Scheme with Hierarchical Down-Sampling Layer

In this paper, we propose a puncturing-based joint source channel coding scheme with a hierarchical down-sampling layer (PJSCC). The proposed hierarchical down-sampling layer fully exploits both frequency and spatial priors. Moreover, to achieve adaptive compression ratio control, PJSCC utilizes a shared puncturing table as a global prior shared between the sender and receiver. This puncturing table plays a vital role in selectively pruning or padding symbols, and the adaptation of the compression ratio is achieved through the manual configuration of hyperparameters to adjust the puncturing rate. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves superior reconstruction performance across several classic datasets.