SAFT: Sensitivity-Aware Filtering and Transmission for Adaptive 3D Point Cloud Communication over Wireless Channels
Authors: Huda Adam Sirag Mekki, Hui Yuan, Mohanad M. G. Hassan, Zejia Chen, Guanghui Zhang
Organizations: School of Control Science and Engineering, Shandong University, Ji’nan, 250061, China · Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and System Control, Ministry of Education, Ji’nan, 250061, China · School of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University, Qingdao, China
Reliable transmission of 3D point clouds over wireless channels is challenging due to time-varying signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and limited bandwidth. This paper introduces sensitivity-aware filtering and transmission (SAFT), a learned transmission framework that integrates a Point-BERT-inspired encoder, a sensitivity-guided token filtering (STF) unit, a quantization block, and an SNR-aware decoder for adaptive reconstruction. Specifically, the STF module assigns token-wise importance scores based on the reconstruction sensitivity of each token under channel perturbation. We further employ a training-only symbol-usage penalty to stabilize the discrete representation, without affecting the transmitted payload. Experiments on ShapeNet, ModelNet40, and 8iVFB show that SAFT improves geometric fidelity (D1/D2 PSNR) compared with a separate source--channel coding pipeline (G-PCC combined with LDPC and QAM) and existing learned baselines, with the largest gains observed in low-SNR regimes, highlighting improved robustness under limited bandwidth.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Overview of the proposed SAFT.
Fig. 2: Detailed architecture of the transformer-based point-token encoder.
Fig. 3: Sensitivity scoring MLP. The module estimates token-wise sensitivity scores S∈[0,1] from Z .
Fig. 4: SNR embedding module.
Fig. 5: Detailed architecture of the refinement-based decoder for 3D point cloud reconstruction.
Fig. 6: Performance comparison on the ShapeNet dataset across SNR levels. (a) D1 PSNR; (b) D2 PSNR.
Method
SEPT
G-PCC (octree)+LDPC
V-PCC+LDPC
PCST
SAFT
AWGN
Rayleigh
AWGN
Rayleigh
AWGN
Rayleigh
AWGN
Rayleigh
AWGN
Rayleigh
0 dB
10 dB
0 dB
10 dB
0 dB
10 dB
0 dB
10 dB
0 dB
10 dB
0 dB
10 dB
0 dB
10 dB
0 dB
10 dB
0 dB
10 dB
0 dB
10 dB
Soldier
Metrics
D1 ↑
29.34
30.37
27.83
28.43
–
70.75
–
–
–
71.84
–
67.81
N/A
71.42
N/A
70.72
69.82
71.78
64.87
69.81
D2 ↑
30.54
31.91
28.86
29.59
–
75.55
–
–
–
74.99
–
69.76
N/A
74.82
N/A
74.06
74.58
76.50
69.94
74.43
Avg ↑
29.94
31.14
28.35
29.01
–
73.15
–
–
–
73.42
–
68.79
N/A
73.12
N/A
72.39
72.20
74.14
67.41
72.12
TABLE I: D1 and D2 PSNR on 8iVFB under AWGN and Rayleigh at SNRs of 0 and 10 dB.
Fig. 7: Performance comparison on the ModelNet40 dataset across SNR levels. (a) D1 PSNR; (b) D2 PSNR.
Fig. 8: Robust reconstruction on Longdress under AWGN and Rayleigh channels. (a) D1 (AWGN); (b) D2 (AWGN); (c) D1 (Rayleigh); (d) D2 (Rayleigh).
Fig. 9: Visual comparison of the Andrew under an AWGN channel with SNR = 10 dB.
Fig. 10: Input-density robustness at SNR=−10 dB: N=2048 vs. N=4096 . Colors show normalized pointwise error.
Fig. 11: D1 PSNR across CBR at different SNR levels.
Fig. 12: Ablation study of the SAFT architecture under varying SNRs. (a) D1 PSNR; (b) D2 PSNR.
Wireless transmission of high-dimensional 3D point clouds (PCs) is increasingly required in industrial collaborative robotics systems. Conventional compression methods prioritize geometric fidelity, although many practical applications ultimately depend on reliable task-level inference rather than exact coordinate reconstruction. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end semantic communication framework for wireless 3D PC transmission and conduct a systematic study of the relationship between geometric reconstruction fidelity and semantic robustness under channel impairments. The proposed architecture jointly supports geometric recovery and object classification from a shared transmitted representation, enabling direct comparison between coordinate-level and task-level sensitivity to noise. Experimental evaluation on a real industrial dataset reveals a pronounced asymmetry: semantic inference remains stable across a broad signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) range even when geometric reconstruction quality degrades significantly. These results demonstrate that reliable task execution does not require high-fidelity geometric recovery and provide design insights for task-oriented wireless perception systems in bandwidth- and power-constrained industrial environments.
Vukan Ninkovic, Tamara Sobot, Vladimir Vincan +3
The Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research and Development of Serbia, Serbia · Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Serbia
Scalable compression is essential for bandwidth-adaptive transmission, yet most learned codecs are optimized for a fixed rate-distortion point, making rate adaptation costly due to re-encoding or maintaining multiple bitstreams. In this work, we propose TAFA-GSGC, a scalable learned point cloud geometry codec that enables multi-quality decoding from a single bitstream and a single trained model. TAFA-GSGC combines layered residual refinement with channel-group entropy coding, and introduces a Target-Aligned Feature Aggregation module to reduce cross-layer redundancy in enhancement residuals. Our framework supports up to 9 decodable quality levels with monotonic quality improvement as more subbitstreams are received, while maintaining strong compression efficiency. Compared with the PCGCv2 baseline, TAFA-GSGC demonstrates improved RD performance, achieving average BD-rate reductions of 4.99% and 5.92% in terms of D1-PSNR and D2-PSNR, respectively.
Xiumei Li, Alexander Kopte, André Kaup
Chair of Multimedia Communications and Signal Processing Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) Erlangen, Germany
Noisy and corrupted points can substantially degrade point cloud recognition performance, especially under challenging corruption settings. In particular, full fine-tuning of 3D pre-trained models may amplify the influence of outliers and overwrite robustness priors learned during pre-training, while naive parameter-efficient adaptation remains sensitive to corrupted tokens. To address this issue, we propose PSFT, a point-selection fine-tuning framework that improves robustness while remaining parameter-efficient. PSFT first estimates point-wise influence from pre-pooling features and adaptively retains minimally influential points to suppress outliers. Based on the selected subset, a prompt generation branch predicts layer-wise prompt tokens and injects them into a frozen backbone for lightweight downstream adaptation. To further mitigate residual noise after selection, we append a lightweight feature filter with bottleneck MLP transformation and Beta-gated residual blending to refine patch-token representations before prediction. Extensive experiments show that PSFT consistently reduces corruption error on ModelNet-C and ModelNet40-C across all tested 3D pre-trained backbones, while achieving the strongest ScanObjectNN-C results with ULIP-2 and Uni3D-B among the evaluated tuning strategies. Our implementation can be found at https://github.com/CVChMA/PSFT/tree/master.
Da Li, Chang Ma, Dongfu Yin
Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy (Shenzhen), Shenzhen, China · Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China