Synesthesia of Machines (SoM)-Empowered Wireless Image Transmission over Complex Dynamic Channel

Abstract: Wireless image transmission underpins diverse networked intelligent services and becomes an increasingly critical issue. Existing works have shown that deep learning-based joint source-channel coding (JSCC) is an effective framework to balance image transmission fidelity and data overhead. However, these studies oversimplify the communication system as a mere pipeline with noise, failing to account for the complex dynamics of wireless channels and concrete physical-layer transmission process. To address these limitations, we propose a Synesthesia of Machines (SoM)-empowered Dynamic Channel Adaptive Transmission (DCAT) scheme, designed for practical implementation in real communication scenarios. Building upon the Swin Transformer backbone, our DCAT scheme demonstrates robust adaptability to time-selective fading and channel aging effects by effectively utilizing the physical-layer transmission characteristics of wireless channels. Comprehensive experimental results confirm that DCAT consistently achieves superior performance compared with JSCC baseline approaches across all conditions. Furthermore, our neural network architecture demonstrates high scalability due to its interpretable design, offering substantial potential for cost-efficient deployment in practical applications.