Semantic Arithmetic Coding using Synonymous Mappings

Abstract: Recent semantic communication methods explore effective ways to expand the communication paradigm and improve the system performance of the communication systems. Nonetheless, the common problem of these methods is that the essence of semantics is not explicitly pointed out and directly utilized. A new epistemology suggests that synonymy, which is revealed as the fundamental feature of semantics, guides the establishment of the semantic information theory from a novel viewpoint. Building on this theoretical basis, this paper proposes a semantic arithmetic coding (SAC) method for semantic lossless compression using intuitive semantic synonymy. By constructing reasonable synonymous mappings and performing arithmetic coding procedures over synonymous sets, SAC can achieve higher compression efficiency for meaning-contained source sequences at the semantic level and thereby approximate the semantic entropy limits. Experimental results on edge texture map compression show an evident improvement in coding efficiency using SAC without semantic losses, compared to traditional arithmetic coding, which demonstrates its effectiveness.