Semantic Communication for Intelligent Transmission and Recognition of High-Resolution Satellite Images in...

Very-high-resolution (VHR) multispectral satellite imagery contains rich semantic information, yet its real-time transmission is constrained by limited satellite-to-ground bandwidth and dynamic channel impairments. Conventional communication schemes prioritize pixel-level reconstruction, resulting in large transmission overhead and poor robustness under unfavorable channel conditions. To address these challenges, an end-to-end task-oriented semantic communication framework for remote sensing downstream recognition tasks, termed Semantic Transmission Architecture for Remote Sensing (STARS), is proposed. To improve transmission efficiency for very-high-resolution remote sensing images with highly redundant background regions, a Semantic Feature Reweighting Module (SFRM) is introduced to dynamically evaluate token-level semantic importance and adaptively allocate transmission resources to task-critical features. Furthermore, vector quantization and a practical digital transmission chain are jointly integrated to achieve efficient semantic compression, while dynamic channel variations are incorporated during training to improve robustness under fading channel conditions. Experimental results on the DOTA dataset demonstrate that STARS consistently outperforms conventional schemes and existing semantic baselines under Rician fading channels, validating the effectiveness of semantic-aware feature allocation for bandwidth-efficient VHR imagery transmission.