Foundation Model-Based Adaptive Semantic Image Transmission for Dynamic Wireless Environments

Abstract: Foundation model-based semantic transmission has recently shown great potential in wireless image communication. However, existing methods exhibit two major limitations: (i) they overlook the varying importance of semantic components for specific downstream tasks, and (ii) they insufficiently exploit wireless domain knowledge, resulting in limited robustness under dynamic channel conditions. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a foundation model-based adaptive semantic image transmission system for dynamic wireless environments, such as autonomous driving. The proposed system decomposes each image into a semantic segmentation map and a compressed representation, enabling task-aware prioritization of critical objects and fine-grained textures. A task-adaptive precoding mechanism then allocates radio resources according to the semantic importance of extracted features. To ensure accurate channel information for precoding, a channel estimation knowledge map (CEKM) is constructed using a conditional diffusion model that integrates user position, velocity, and sparse channel samples to train scenario-specific lightweight estimators. At the receiver, a conditional diffusion model reconstructs high-quality images from the received semantic features, ensuring robustness against channel impairments and partial data loss. Simulation results on the BDD100K dataset with multi-scenario channels generated by QuaDRiGa demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing approaches in terms of perceptual quality (SSIM, LPIPS, FID), task-specific accuracy (IoU), and transmission efficiency. These results highlight the effectiveness of integrating task-aware semantic decomposition, scenario-adaptive channel estimation, and diffusion-based reconstruction for robust semantic transmission in dynamic wireless environments.