arXiv · 2605.16388
ChronoSC: Task-Oriented Semantic Communication via Temporal-to-Color Encoding
Abstract
Semantic communication (SC) aims to reduce transmission overhead by conveying task-relevant information rather than raw data. However, existing SC approaches for video largely focus on pixel-level reconstruction or rely on complex spatiotemporal pipelines, leading to excessive bandwidth usage and latency that are unsuitable for low-resource deployments. In this paper, we propose ChronoSC, a task-oriented semantic communication framework for Video Question Answering (VideoQA). ChronoSC introduces Chrono-Color Stacking, a lightweight and lossless projection scheme that encodes temporal video dynamics into a single static image, enabling extreme temporal compression before transmission. This compact semantic representation is transmitted using a lightweight Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding (DeepJSCC) transceiver and explicitly reconstructed at the receiver. Unlike latent-space methods, explicit visual reconstruction enables the direct reuse of pre-trained vision-language models; specifically, a pre-trained BLIP model is employed to infer answers from noisy, reconstructed chrono-images. Experiments on the CLEVRER dataset show that ChronoSC achieves up to 192 times bandwidth reduction compared to raw video transmission while maintaining high VideoQA accuracy.
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Phuc H. Nguyen, Trung T. Nguyen, Quy N. Duong, Van-Dinh Nguyen. 2026-05-11. ChronoSC: Task-Oriented Semantic Communication via Temporal-to-Color Encoding. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16388
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