{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,9]],"date-time":"2026-07-09T11:15:59Z","timestamp":1783595759089,"version":"3.55.0"},"reference-count":27,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"14","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,9]],"date-time":"2026-07-09T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1783555200000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100004826","name":"Beijing Natural Science Foundation","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["L232051"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["L232051"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100004826","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Sensors"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Unmanned aerial vehicle semantic communications are increasingly required in low-altitude sensing, intelligent inspection, and emergency response, where raw image transmission is difficult to sustain under limited onboard resources and time-varying air-to-ground links. Meanwhile, the simultaneous transmission of visual semantic features and object-centre location metadata under third-party eavesdropping creates a dual-privacy vulnerability: an attacker can exploit both to reconstruct sensitive content. In this paper, we propose a differential privacy-based collaborative protection framework that inserts dedicated perturbations into visual semantic and location descriptors before transmission. For visual data, we design a region-aware differential privacy mechanism that applies stronger noise to sensitive semantic regions while preserving utility for non-critical areas. For location data, a scenario-adaptive strategy is developed, comprising randomized differential privacy for discrete grid-based location information (coarse spatial awareness) and Laplace-based differential privacy for continuous coordinates (fine-grained protection). To balance privacy and utility, we formulate a joint optimization problem. It maximizes legitimate-side semantic task performance by coordinating the visual privacy budget, location privacy budget, and transmit power. A BCD-based algorithm is developed to solve this non-convex problem. Attacker-side recoverability is verified empirically at the optimized operating point. Simulation results demonstrate stable convergence within a small number of iterations. Compared with uniform differential privacy, the proposed framework achieves a superior task-level privacy\u2013utility trade-off and provides selective sensitive-region protection, with the two mechanisms yielding comparable whole-image attack suppression.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/s26144358","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,9]],"date-time":"2026-07-09T10:16:22Z","timestamp":1783592182000},"page":"4358","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Differential-Privacy-Based Collaborative Protection for Visual and Location Data in UAV Semantic Communications"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"26","author":[{"given":"Sitang","family":"Yue","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Cyberspace Security, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Chong","family":"Zhan","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Cyberspace Security, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0003-8494-1763","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Guanwu","family":"Jiang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Information and Communication Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Yingmin","family":"Qiu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Cyberspace Security, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-6257-7732","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Shujun","family":"Han","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Cyberspace Security, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,9]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"37","DOI":"10.1109\/COMST.2024.3412852","article-title":"Less Data, More Knowledge: Building Next-Generation Semantic Communication Networks","volume":"27","author":"Chaccour","year":"2025","journal-title":"IEEE Commun. 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