Multiuser Content-Style Adaptive Semantic Communication for Image Transmission

With the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, an increasing number of resource-constrained devices operate in dynamic and heterogeneous network environments, posing challenges for efficient image transmission. Multiuser semantic communication (SC) enables reduced bandwidth consumption and enhanced noise resilience by understanding the intrinsic meaning of information and sharing common semantic features across devices, offering great potential for widespread applications in various IoT scenarios. However, current multiusers SC approaches for image transmission lack adaptability and fail to consider both content and style features, leading to degraded image reconstruction quality. Moreover, semantic redundancy among devices remains underutilized, limiting bandwidth efficiency in IoT networks. To address these limitations, in this article, a novel multiuser content-style adaptive SC system for image transmission in IoT scenarios is proposed. Specifically, a dual-branch semantic information extraction and adaptive recovery scheme is first established, which simultaneously captures and adaptively fuses semantic content and style features to improve reconstruction quality. Second, an adaptive common information extraction and enhanced coding module is introduced for resource-limited IoT devices, which dynamically adjusts the transmission rate based on varying channel conditions and the computational capabilities of different users, further optimizing communication performance. Finally, experimental results show that the proposed method improves peak signal-to-noise (PSNR) by at least 10% under poor SNR conditions for multiusers SC, compared to baseline methods.