Task-Oriented Semantic Compression for Localization at the Network Edge

Achieving precise visual localization in GPS-limited urban environments poses significant challenges for resource-constrained mobile platforms, particularly under strict bandwidth, memory, and processing limitations. Inspired by mammalian spatial cognition, we propose a task-oriented communication framework in which bandwidth-limited endpoints equipped with multi-camera systems extract compact multi-view features and offload localization tasks to collaborative edge servers. We introduce the Orthogonally-constrained Variational Information Bottleneck encoder (O-VIB), which incorporates automatic relevance determination (ARD) to prune non-informative features while enforcing orthogonality to minimize redundancy. This enables efficient and accurate localization with minimal transmission overhead. Extensive evaluation on a real-world urban localization dataset demonstrates that O-VIB achieves high-precision localization under stringent bandwidth budgets, outperforming existing methods across diverse communication constraints.