HMS-SCP: Task-Oriented Multi-Scale Semantic Communication for V2X Cooperative Perception

Abstract

Cooperative perception enables vehicles and infrastructure to exchange sensor data via Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication, extending sensing coverage beyond occlusions and mitigating blind spots. While critical for autonomous driving and safety, practical deployments often rely on bandwidth-efficient late fusion. Recently, intermediate fusion has emerged as a promising approach for an optimal bandwidth-accuracy trade-off. However, in dense urban environments, cumulative bandwidth demands can overwhelm network capacity, potentially compromising safety-critical Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) functions. To alleviate these problems, this paper proposes Hierarchical Multi-Scale Semantic-Aware Cooperative Perception (HMS-SCP), a robust noise-resilient and bandwidth-efficient framework for task-oriented semantic communication in cooperative perception. HMS-SCP employs a spatial importance predictor to identify task-relevant grid elements at each scale, which are then directly mapped into complex-valued symbols for Joint Source-Channel Coding (JSCC). Unlike prior methods that rely on high-dimensional symbol projections for robustness, HMS-SCP exploits structural semantic redundancy across multiple scales to enhance resilience against channel noise, while maintaining an ultra-low symbol rate. This design significantly reduces bandwidth consumption and mitigates network congestion in high-density vehicular environments. Extensive evaluations on the simulated OPV2V and real-world DAIR-V2X datasets demonstrate that HMS-SCP effectively prevents performance collapse under severe Rayleigh fading and extreme compression ratio, maintaining high-confidence far-field detection with a real-time latency of below 16~ms, well within the safety-critical thresholds for dynamic V2X environments.