Organizations: Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Large-scale three-dimensional (3D) scene reconstruction in low-altitude intelligent networks (LAIN) demands highly efficient wireless image transmission. However, existing schemes struggle to balance severe pilot overhead with the transmission accuracy required to maintain reconstruction fidelity. To strike a balance between efficiency and reliability, this paper proposes a novel deep learning-based end-to-end (E2E) transceiver design that integrates 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) directly into the training process. By jointly optimizing the communication modules via the combined 3DGS rendering loss, our approach explicitly improves scene recovery quality. Furthermore, this task-driven framework enables the use of a sparse pilot scheme, significantly reducing transmission overhead while maintaining robust image recovery under low-altitude channel conditions. Extensive experiments on real-world aerial image datasets demonstrate that the proposed E2E design significantly outperforms existing baselines, delivering superior transmission performance and accurate 3D scene reconstructions.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Illustration of the low-altitude intelligent network imagery scenario. Traditional full pilot schemes suffer from prohibitive signaling overhead, whereas the proposed AI-driven sparse pilot transmission improves spectral efficiency for downstream 3D scene reconstruction.
Fig. 2: Architecture of the proposed task-oriented end-to-end transceiver. The transmitter utilizes a Transformer-based Moduformer for resilient constellation mapping, while the receiver employs a Deep-Rx network. Both modules are jointly optimized driven by the 3DGS rendering loss.
Fig. 3: BLER comparison of various transmission schemes versus SNR.
Fig. 4: Effective throughput comparison across varying SNRs.
Fig. 5: Quantitative evaluation of novel view synthesis quality. (a) PSNR versus training iterations. (b) SSIM versus training iterations.
Fig. 6: Qualitative visualization with and without the task-oriented loss.
Fig. 7: Qualitative visualization of the reconstructed 3D scene (HAV).
Low-altitude Gaussian splatting (LAGS) facilitates 3D scene reconstruction by aggregating aerial images from distributed drones. However, as LAGS prioritizes maximizing reconstruction quality over communication throughput, existing low-altitude resource allocation schemes become inefficient. This inefficiency stems from their failure to account for image diversity introduced by varying viewpoints. To fill this gap, we propose a groupwise heterogeneous graph neural network (GW-HGNN) for LAGS resource allocation. GW-HGNN explicitly models the non-uniform contribution of different image groups to the reconstruction process, thus automatically balancing data fidelity and transmission cost. The key insight of GW-HGNN is to transform LAGS losses and communication constraints into graph learning costs for dual-level message passing. Experiments on real-world LAGS datasets demonstrate that GW-HGNN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks across key rendering metrics, including PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS. Furthermore, GW-HGNN reduces computational latency by approximately 100x compared to the widely-used MOSEK solver, achieving millisecond-level inference suitable for real-time deployment.
Yikun Wang, Yujie Wan, Wei Zuo +4
The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China · Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China · Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China +2
The rapid development of low-altitude economy has driven the proliferation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) applications, including logistics, inspection, and emergency response. However, transmitting high-volume image data from UAVs to ground stations faces significant challenges due to limited bandwidth and stringent privacy requirements. To address these issues, a Semantic Communication (SC) framework based on Federated Learning (FL) is proposed for efficient and privacy-preserving image transmission. A Swin Transformer-based Semantic Communication (STSC) architecture is designed to extract multi-scale semantic features under constrained bandwidth conditions. Dedicated communication and computing nodes are deployed on UAVs to enhance real-time coverage and flexibility. Meanwhile, a FL mechanism enables global model training across distributed devices without sharing raw data, thus preserving user privacy. Simulation experiments conducted on the CIFAR-10 dataset demonstrate that the proposed STSC framework achieves at least 5.7 dB improvement in Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) compared to DeepJSCC baselines, while also showing superior convergence and generalization performance. The framework effectively integrates UAV-assisted deployment with SC and privacy protection, offering a practical solution for bandwidth-constrained image transmission in low-altitude networks.
Kexin Zhang, Lixin Li, Yuna Yan +5
School of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710129, China · DecoreX Intelligent Technologies Co., Ltd., Xi’an 710075, China · Samsung AI Center, Cambridge CB1 2JH, UK +2
With the emergence of wireless applications in three-dimensional environments, such as the low-altitude airspace and 3D heterogeneous networks, radio map estimation is increasingly required to characterize signal propagation across both horizontal and vertical dimensions. However, extending radio map estimation from 2D to 3D remains challenging due to increased spatial sparsity and limited supervision across continuous altitudes. In this paper, we propose RadioFormer3D, a specialized model for volumetric spectrum reconstruction under weak supervision. Building on the dual-stream, multi-granularity fusion architecture of RadioFormer, RadioFormer3D introduces a Fourier-based sampling encoder and a volumetric decoder to efficiently process sparse measurements in 3D space. To alleviate the lack of vertical supervision, we propose the Joint Spectrum Integrity Loss, which integrates volume-level pseudo-label supervision, map-level geometry-aware radio rendering, and pixel-level localized constraints within a unified optimization scheme. This design enables the model to capture complex vertical structural relationships more effectively under sparse supervision. Extensive experiments across several radio map datasets show that RadioFormer3D achieves superior overall performance compared to representative existing methods. In particular, it demonstrates improved reconstruction quality at unlabeled altitudes while maintaining a favorable trade-off between accuracy and inference efficiency, positioning it as a highly promising solution for future 3D environment-aware wireless networks.
Zheng Fang, Junjie Liu, Kangjun Liu +3
Pengcheng Laboratory, China · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China · Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China