Robust Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding Enabled Distributed Image Transmission with Imperfect Channel State Information

This work is concerned with robust distributed multi-view image transmission over a severe fading channel with imperfect channel state information (CSI), wherein the sources are slightly correlated. In contrast to point-to-point deep joint source-channel coding (DJSCC), the distributed setting introduces the key challenge of exploiting inter-source correlations without direct communication, especially under imperfect CSI. To tackle this problem, we leverage the complementarity and consistency characteristics among the distributed, yet correlated sources, and propose an robust distributed DJSCC, namely RDJSCC. In RDJSCC, we design a novel cross-view information extraction (CVIE) mechanism to capture more nuanced cross-view patterns and dependencies. In addition, a complementarity-consistency fusion (CCF) mechanism is utilized to fuse the complementarity and consistency from multi-view information in a symmetric and compact manner. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that our proposed RDJSCC can effectively leverage the advantages of correlated sources even under severe fading conditions, leading to an improved reconstruction performance.