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arXiv · 2609.23661

LiteSC: Lightweight Semantic Communication for Robust Wireless Telesurgical Video Transmission

Abstract

Reliable laparoscopic video is essential for telesurgery, yet fixed-rate digital transmission can degrade abruptly under poor channel conditions. We propose LiteSC, a lightweight semantic communication framework combining a frozen pretrained extractor, a compact joint source--channel coding pair, and a receiver-adapted surgical renderer. The extractor produces a latent with approximately 97.9\% fewer scalar values than the red--green--blue (RGB) input, while inference requires neither segmentation masks nor temporal reference frames. Using separate CholecSeg8k source videos for training and testing, we evaluate LiteSC over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel at symbol signal-to-noise ratios $E_s/N_0$ from 0 to 25 dB. At a channel bandwidth ratio of $ρ=0.0208$, equivalent to 0.0208 complex channel symbols per RGB source value, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) rises from 28.7 to 31.9 dB, structural similarity index measure (SSIM) from 0.869 to 0.919, and learned perceptual image patch similarity (LPIPS) falls from 0.102 to 0.048. Against H.265 transmission protected by low-density parity-check (LDPC) coding under the same channel-symbol budget, LiteSC achieves higher SSIM and lower LPIPS, although H.265+LDPC attains a higher peak PSNR. These results show graceful laparoscopic frame reconstruction under the evaluated AWGN conditions.

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BibTeXRIS

Zexin Deng, Zhenhui Yuan, Xiang Ji, Yi Han, Gaofeng Li. 2026-09-20. LiteSC: Lightweight Semantic Communication for Robust Wireless Telesurgical Video Transmission. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23661

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