Lossy Coding for Spatially Adaptive Conditioning in Semantic Image Communication

The increasing demand for high-quality, real-time visual communication and the growing user expectations, coupled with limited network resources, necessitate novel approaches to semantic image communication. This paper presents a method to enhance semantic image communication that combines a novel lossy semantic encoding approach with spatially adaptive semantic image synthesis models. By developing a model-agnostic training augmentation strategy, our approach substantially reduces susceptibility to distortion introduced during encoding, effectively eliminating the need for lossless semantic encoding. Comprehensive evaluation across two spatially adaptive conditioning methods and three popular datasets indicates that this approach enhances semantic image communication at very low bit rate regimes.