English

Robust Semantic Transmission for Low-Altitude UAVs: Predictive Channel-Aware Scheduling and Generative Reconstruction

Information Theory 2026-02-12 v1 Image and Video Processing math.IT

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) downlink transmission facilitates critical time-sensitive visual applications but is fundamentally constrained by bandwidth scarcity and dynamic channel impairments. The rapid fluctuation of the air-to-ground (A2G) link creates a regime where reliable transmission slots are intermittent and future channel quality can only be predicted with uncertainty. Conventional deep joint source-channel coding (DeepJSCC) methods transmit coupled feature streams, causing global reconstruction failure when specific time slots experience deep fading. Decoupling semantic content into a deterministic structure component and a stochastic texture component enables differentiated error protection strategies aligned with channel reliability. A predictive transmission framework is developed that utilizes a split-stream variational codec and a channel-aware scheduler to prioritize the delivery of structural layout over reliable slots. Experimental evaluations indicate that this approach achieves a 5.6 dB gain in peak signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio over single-stream baselines and maintains structural fidelity under significant prediction mismatch.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.10482,
  title  = {Robust Semantic Transmission for Low-Altitude UAVs: Predictive Channel-Aware Scheduling and Generative Reconstruction},
  author = {Jijia Tian and Junting Chen and Pooi-Yuen Kam},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.10482},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:31:08.658Z