We consider image transmission via deep joint source-channel coding (DeepJSCC) over multi-hop additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels by training a DeepJSCC encoder-decoder pair with a pre-trained deep hash distillation (DHD) module to semantically cluster images, facilitating security-oriented applications through enhanced semantic consistency and improving the perceptual reconstruction quality. We train the DeepJSCC module to both reduce mean square error (MSE) and minimize cosine distance between DHD hashes of source and reconstructed images. Significantly improved perceptual quality as a result of semantic alignment is illustrated for different multi-hop settings, for which classical DeepJSCC may suffer from noise accumulation, measured by the learned perceptual image patch similarity (LPIPS) metric.
@article{arxiv.2510.06868,
title = {Multi-hop Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding with Deep Hash Distillation for Semantically Aligned Image Recovery},
author = {Didrik Bergström and Deniz Gündüz and Onur Günlü},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.06868},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Change last word in title, add missing trailing bracket, add additional simulation results in section 4.1; results unchanged