{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,11]],"date-time":"2026-08-11T05:28:08Z","timestamp":1786426088769,"version":"build-2736575974"},"reference-count":30,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"16","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,8]],"date-time":"2026-08-08T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1786147200000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100018571","name":"Guangxi Science and Technology Base and Talent Special Project","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["AD25069071"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["AD25069071"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100018571","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","award":["62261003"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["62261003"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"crossref"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","award":["62201160"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["62201160"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"crossref"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","award":["62361003"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["62361003"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"crossref"}]},{"award":["62261003"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["62261003"]}],"id":[{"id":"https:\/\/ror.org\/01h0zpd94","id-type":"ROR","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"award":["62201160"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["62201160"]}],"id":[{"id":"https:\/\/ror.org\/01h0zpd94","id-type":"ROR","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"award":["62361003"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["62361003"]}],"id":[{"id":"https:\/\/ror.org\/01h0zpd94","id-type":"ROR","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"name":"Natural Science Foundation of Guangxi","award":["2025GXNSFAA069672"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2025GXNSFAA069672"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Sensors"],"abstract":"<jats:p>In autonomous driving and intelligent transportation, vehicles need to share visual perception information to extend sensing range, but conventional separate source-channel coding can suffer from the cliff effect under harsh vehicular channels, causing downstream perception failures. This paper proposes an end-to-end semantic communication system for autonomous-driving semantic segmentation. The system adopts SegFormer-B2 as the semantic encoder, performs feature modulation conditioned on the signal-to-noise ratio SNR, applies semantic-aware adaptive bit-width quantization based on Gumbel-Softmax, and uses a task-oriented decoder to directly produce segmentation maps. Experiments on Cityscapes evaluate the system under additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and per-channel independent block Rayleigh fading channels, with comparisons against a JPEG-based separate baseline and fixed-bit-width variants. Under AWGN, the proposed system maintains a mean intersection over union above 0.70 at SNR=\u22126dB, while the conventional baseline fails at SNR=0dB with an mIoU of 0.02, indicating improved robustness against the cliff effect. The results also show a non-monotonic relationship between quantization precision and segmentation performance: fixed 4-bit quantization can outperform fixed 6-bit quantization because finer quantization is more sensitive to channel noise. Under Rayleigh fading, adaptive quantization may suffer from semantic-channel mismatch, providing useful observations for future channel-aware semantic resource allocation.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/s26165035","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,10]],"date-time":"2026-08-10T09:24:53Z","timestamp":1786353893000},"page":"5035","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Task-Oriented Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding with Semantic-Aware Adaptive Quantization for Autonomous Driving"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"26","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0001-7326-2242","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Xin","family":"Wang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Guangxi Key Laboratory of Multimedia Communications and Network Technology, Guangxi University, Nanning 530004, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-0694-1595","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Haiqiang","family":"Chen","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Guangxi Key Laboratory of Multimedia Communications and Network Technology, Guangxi University, Nanning 530004, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-9963-3876","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Youming","family":"Sun","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Guangxi Key Laboratory of Multimedia Communications and Network Technology, Guangxi University, Nanning 530004, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0007-3547-5531","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Xiangcheng","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Guangxi Key Laboratory of Multimedia Communications and Network Technology, Guangxi University, Nanning 530004, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0001-0262-9270","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Min","family":"Xie","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Guangxi Key Laboratory of Multimedia Communications and Network Technology, Guangxi University, Nanning 530004, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,8]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"134","DOI":"10.1109\/MNET.001.1900287","article-title":"A Vision of 6G Wireless Systems: Applications, Trends, Technologies, and Open Research Problems","volume":"34","author":"Saad","year":"2020","journal-title":"IEEE Netw."},{"key":"ref_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"308","DOI":"10.1109\/JPROC.2019.2961937","article-title":"Evolutionary V2X Technologies Toward the Internet of Vehicles: Challenges and Opportunities","volume":"108","author":"Zhou","year":"2020","journal-title":"Proc. IEEE"},{"key":"ref_3","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"160","DOI":"10.1109\/MCOM.2016.1600071CM","article-title":"Millimeter-Wave Vehicular Communication to Support Massive Automotive Sensing","volume":"54","author":"Choi","year":"2016","journal-title":"IEEE Commun. Mag."},{"key":"ref_4","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"567","DOI":"10.1109\/TCCN.2019.2919300","article-title":"Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding for Wireless Image Transmission","volume":"5","author":"Bourtsoulatze","year":"2019","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Cogn. Commun. Netw."},{"key":"ref_5","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"2315","DOI":"10.1109\/TCSVT.2021.3082521","article-title":"Wireless Image Transmission Using Deep Source Channel Coding With Attention Modules","volume":"32","author":"Xu","year":"2022","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. Video Technol."},{"key":"ref_6","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Ding, M., Li, J., Ma, M., and Fan, X. (2021). SNR-Adaptive Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding for Wireless Image Transmission. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), IEEE.","DOI":"10.1109\/ICASSP39728.2021.9414037"},{"key":"ref_7","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"720","DOI":"10.1109\/JSAIT.2022.3231042","article-title":"DeepJSCC-Q: Constellation Constrained Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding","volume":"3","author":"Tung","year":"2022","journal-title":"IEEE J. Sel. Areas Inf. Theory"},{"key":"ref_8","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"178","DOI":"10.1109\/JSAIT.2020.2987203","article-title":"DeepJSCC-f: Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding of Images With Feedback","volume":"1","author":"Kurka","year":"2020","journal-title":"IEEE J. Sel. Areas Inf. Theory"},{"key":"ref_9","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"213","DOI":"10.1109\/COMST.2022.3223224","article-title":"Semantic Communications for Future Internet: Fundamentals, Applications, and Challenges","volume":"25","author":"Yang","year":"2023","journal-title":"IEEE Commun. Surv. Tutor."},{"key":"ref_10","unstructured":"Qin, Z., Tao, X., Lu, J., Tong, W., and Li, G.Y. (2022). Semantic Communications: Principles and Challenges. arXiv."},{"key":"ref_11","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Pan, Q., Tong, H., Lv, J., Luo, T., Zhang, Z., Yin, C., and Li, J. (2023). Image Segmentation Semantic Communication over Internet of Vehicles. Proceedings of the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC), IEEE.","DOI":"10.1109\/WCNC55385.2023.10118717"},{"key":"ref_12","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"228","DOI":"10.23919\/JCC.fa.2023-0771.202602","article-title":"Importance-Aware Image Segmentation-Based Semantic Communication for Autonomous Driving","volume":"23","author":"Lyu","year":"2026","journal-title":"China Commun."},{"key":"ref_13","first-page":"12077","article-title":"SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers","volume":"Volume 34","author":"Xie","year":"2021","journal-title":"Proceedings of the Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems"},{"key":"ref_14","unstructured":"Jang, E., Gu, S., and Poole, B. (2017, January 24\u201326). Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax. Proceedings of the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), Toulon, France."},{"key":"ref_15","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"107930","DOI":"10.1016\/j.comnet.2021.107930","article-title":"6G Networks: Beyond Shannon Towards Semantic and Goal-Oriented Communications","volume":"190","author":"Barbarossa","year":"2021","journal-title":"Comput. Netw."},{"key":"ref_16","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"197","DOI":"10.1109\/JSAC.2021.3126087","article-title":"Learning Task-Oriented Communication for Edge Inference: An Information Bottleneck Approach","volume":"40","author":"Shao","year":"2022","journal-title":"IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun."},{"key":"ref_17","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"2663","DOI":"10.1109\/TSP.2021.3071210","article-title":"Deep Learning Enabled Semantic Communication Systems","volume":"69","author":"Xie","year":"2021","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Signal Process."},{"key":"ref_18","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"214","DOI":"10.1109\/JSAC.2022.3221977","article-title":"Wireless Deep Video Semantic Transmission","volume":"41","author":"Wang","year":"2023","journal-title":"IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun."},{"key":"ref_19","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Yang, K., Wang, S., Dai, J., Tan, K., Niu, K., and Zhang, P. (2023). WITT: A Wireless Image Transmission Transformer for Semantic Communications. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), IEEE.","DOI":"10.1109\/ICASSP49357.2023.10094735"},{"key":"ref_20","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"137","DOI":"10.1109\/TITS.2018.2801309","article-title":"Importance-Aware Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Vehicles","volume":"20","author":"Chen","year":"2019","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Intell. Transp. Syst."},{"key":"ref_21","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Ye, S., Wu, Q., Fan, P., and Fan, Q. (2025). A Survey on Semantic Communications in Internet of Vehicles. Entropy, 27.","DOI":"10.3390\/e27040445"},{"key":"ref_22","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"149","DOI":"10.1109\/MNET.2024.3468328","article-title":"Semantic Communication for Edge Intelligence Enabled Autonomous Driving System","volume":"39","author":"Feng","year":"2025","journal-title":"IEEE Netw."},{"key":"ref_23","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"17620","DOI":"10.1109\/TWC.2026.3695614","article-title":"Enhanced Pilot Design for Collision-Resilient Unsourced Random Access in Massive MIMO","volume":"25","author":"Shi","year":"2026","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Wirel. Commun."},{"key":"ref_24","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Cordts, M., Omran, M., Ramos, S., Rehfeld, T., Enzweiler, M., Benenson, R., Franke, U., Roth, S., and Schiele, B. (2016). The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding. Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), IEEE.","DOI":"10.1109\/CVPR.2016.350"},{"key":"ref_25","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"3942","DOI":"10.1609\/aaai.v32i1.11671","article-title":"FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer","volume":"Volume 32","author":"Perez","year":"2018","journal-title":"Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence"},{"key":"ref_26","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Hu, J., Shen, L., and Sun, G. (2018). Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks. Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), IEEE.","DOI":"10.1109\/CVPR.2018.00745"},{"key":"ref_27","unstructured":"Bengio, Y., L\u00e9onard, N., and Courville, A. (2013). Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation. arXiv."},{"key":"ref_28","unstructured":"Loshchilov, I., and Hutter, F. (2019, January 6\u20139). Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization. Proceedings of the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), New Orleans, LA, USA."},{"key":"ref_29","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"xviii","DOI":"10.1109\/30.125072","article-title":"The JPEG Still Picture Compression Standard","volume":"38","author":"Wallace","year":"1992","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Consum. Electron."},{"key":"ref_30","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Tse, D., and Viswanath, P. (2005). Fundamentals of Wireless Communication, Cambridge University Press.","DOI":"10.1017\/CBO9780511807213"}],"container-title":["Sensors"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1424-8220\/26\/16\/5035\/pdf","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,11]],"date-time":"2026-08-11T04:37:17Z","timestamp":1786423037000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1424-8220\/26\/16\/5035"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,8]]},"references-count":30,"journal-issue":{"issue":"16","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,8]]}},"alternative-id":["s26165035"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/s26165035","relation":{},"ISSN":["1424-8220"],"issn-type":[{"value":"1424-8220","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,8]]}}}