Hybrid Semantic-Complementary Transmission for High-Fidelity Image Reconstruction

Abstract: Recent advances in semantic communication (SC) have introduced neural network (NN)-based transceivers that convey semantic representation (SR) of signals such as images. However, these NNs are trained over diverse image distributions and thus often fail to reconstruct fine-grained image-specific details. To overcome this limited reconstruction fidelity, we propose an extended SC framework, hybrid semantic communication (HSC), which supplements SR with complementary representation (CR) capturing residual image-specific information. The CR is constructed at the transmitter, and is combined with the actual SC outcome at the receiver to yield a high-fidelity recomposed image. While the transmission load of SR is fixed due to its NN-based structure, the load of CR can be flexibly adjusted to achieve a desirable fidelity. This controllability directly influences the final reconstruction error, for which we derive a closed-form expression and the corresponding optimal CR. Simulation results demonstrate that HSC substantially reduces MSE compared to the baseline SC without CR transmission across various channels and NN architectures.