Role of Sensing and Computer Vision in 6G Wireless Communications

Recently, we have been witnessing the remarkable progress and widespread adoption of sensing technologies in autonomous driving, robotics, and metaverse. Considering the rapid advancement of computer vision (CV) technology to analyze the sensing information, we anticipate a proliferation of wireless applications exploiting the sensing and CV technologies in 6G. In this article, we provide a holistic overview of the sensing and CV-aided wireless communications (SVWC) framework for 6G. By analyzing the high-resolution sensing information through the powerful CV techniques, SVWC can quickly and accurately understand wireless environments and then perform wireless tasks. To demonstrate the efficacy of SVWC, we design the whole process of SVWC including the sensing dataset collection, DL model training, and execution of realistic wireless tasks. From numerical evaluations of 6G communication scenarios, we show that SVWC achieves considerable performance gains over conventional 5G systems in terms of positioning accuracy, data rate, and access latency.