WVSC: Wireless Video Semantic Communication with Multi-frame Compensation

Existing wireless video transmission schemes directly conduct video coding in pixel level, while neglecting the inner semantics contained in videos. In this paper, we propose a wireless video semantic communication framework, abbreviated as WVSC, which integrates the idea of semantic communication into wireless video transmission scenarios. WVSC first encodes original video frames as semantic frames and then conducts video coding based on such compact representations, enabling the video coding in semantic level rather than pixel level. Moreover, to further reduce the communication overhead, a reference semantic frame is introduced to substitute motion vectors of each frame in common video coding methods. At the receiver, multi-frame compensation (MFC) is proposed to produce compensated current semantic frame with a multi-frame fusion attention module. With both the reference frame transmission and MFC, the bandwidth efficiency improves with satisfying video transmission performance. Experimental results verify the performance gain of WVSC over other DL-based methods e.g. DVSC about 1 dB and traditional schemes about 2 dB in terms of PSNR.