Robust Semantic Transmission of Images with Generative Adversarial Networks

Image compression and bit transmission are con-ducted separately in most existing methods for image trans-mission, leading to possible transmission failure or a waste of communication resource for a time-varying channel condition. This paper proposes a neural network-based image transmission system trained by generative adversarial networks (GANs) aiming to achieve robust transmission. Specifically, the deep semantic of an input image is extracted and represented as bit streams at the transmitter, and the receiver reconstructs the original image based on possible bit error and the same background knowledge as the transmitter. Experimental results show that the proposed robust transmission system trained by GAN can adapt to the current communication condition, and achieve a high-quality reconstruction even with a high transmission error rate and a smaller transmission data size than engineered codecs such as JPEG.