Goal-Oriented Semantic Communication for Wireless Image Transmission via Stable Diffusion

Abstract: Efficient image transmission is essential for seamless communication and collaboration within the visually-driven digital landscape. To achieve low latency and high-quality image reconstruction over a bandwidth-constrained noisy wireless channel, we propose a stable diffusion (SD)-based goal-oriented semantic communication (GSC) framework. In this framework, we design a semantic autoencoder that effectively extracts semantic information (SI) from images to reduce the transmission data size while ensuring high-quality reconstruction. Recognizing the impact of wireless channel noise on SI transmission, we propose an SD-based denoiser for GSC (SD-GSC) conditional on an instantaneous channel gain to remove the channel noise from the received noisy SI under known channel. For scenarios with unknown channel, we further propose a parallel SD denoiser for GSC (PSD-GSC) to jointly learn the distribution of channel gains and denoise the received SI. It is shown that, with the known channel, our SD-GSC outperforms state-of-the-art ADJSCC and Latent-Diff DNSC, improving Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) by 32% and 21%, and reducing Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) by 40% and 35%, respectively. With the unknown channel, our PSD-GSC improves PSNR by 8% and reduces FID by 17% compared to MMSE equalizer-enhanced SD-GSC.