Utility-Aware Progressive Inference over UDP Packet Blocks for Emergency Communications

Abstract: Emergency communications increasingly rely on remote visual inference for timely hazard detection under stringent bandwidth and latency constraints. However, conventional UDP-based visual delivery typically performs inference only after the full payload has been received, even though partially received packet blocks may already contain sufficient task-relevant evidence for reliable decision making. This paper proposes a utility-aware progressive inference framework for emergency communications, which operates directly on UDP packet blocks and determines when sufficient task value has been accumulated for early hazard recognition. Specifically, the sender estimates packet-level decision utility as lightweight control metadata, while the receiver progressively updates partial observations, accumulates the utility of received packets, and triggers an early stop once the normalized utility exceeds a prescribed threshold. Experiments on a fire-scene detection dataset show that, at the main operating point, the proposed method reduces the average packet budget by 34.2% and the decision delay by 1209.17 ms while retaining 91.5% of the full-reception match rate. The method also maintains its advantage over the stability-based baseline under moderate packet loss and different packet-arrival orders. These results demonstrate that packet-level utility provides an effective basis for communication-efficient and delay-aware hazard recognition over UDP-based emergency links.