SafeStep: An Interactive Demonstration of Semantic Communication for Pedestrian Safety Monitoring

Abstract:In this paper, we develop SafeStep, an interactive browser-based semantic communication platform for live pedestrian safety monitoring. SafeStep extracts pedestrian information from four live traffic-camera feeds, transmits it through a semantic communication transceiver over an Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel, and renders user-specific positions, trajectories, and risk labels. The platform allows to independently select the transceiver, Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), codelength, and Age of Information (AoI), and demonstrates the transceiver performance of the selected configuration through live pedestrian safety monitoring to each browser. SafeStep compares a recently proposed semantic communication design called Meta-VIB with five baseline transceivers. Meta-VIB uses a compact neural model with only $4.16$ million parameters to generalize across varying SNR, codelength, and AoI values without online retraining. Experimental results show that Meta-VIB achieves mean task-loss reductions of up to $92.1\%$. On one high-end GPU server, the integrated concurrent-access workload maintains the target $5$ frames/s through $20$ users. At $100$ users, each requesting a distinct configuration, SafeStep records no request failures and a mean application response time below $1$ s, but its mean per-browser frame rate falls to approximately $1$ frame/s. To our knowledge, SafeStep is the first real-time semantic communication platform to make AoI-induced downstream degradation directly observable in live monitoring applications.

6 pages, 5 figures. Submitted to the Quality, Value, and Age of Information for Tactical Networks workshop at the IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM). Christian McDowell, Andrea Panebianco, and Jeremiah Yang are co-primary authors

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2608.27688 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2608.27688v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.27688 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)