Autoencoder based image quality metric for modelling semantic noise in semantic communications

Semantic communication has attracted significant attention as a key technology for emerging 6G communications. This paper proposes an autoencoder based image quality metric to quantify the semantic noise. An autoencoder is initially trained with the reference image to generate the encoder-decoder model and calculate its Latent Vector Space (LVS) and then a semantically generated/received image is inserted into the same autoencoder to create the corresponding LVS. Finally, both LVS are used to define the Euclidean space to calculate the mean square error between two LVS. Results indicate that the proposed model has a high correlation coefficient of 88% with subjective quality assessment and commonly used conventional metrics completely failed in semantic noise modelling.