PerSemCom: A Personalized Semantic Communication Framework for Speech Transmission

By focusing on the intrinsic meaning of information, semantic communication (SemCom) marks a fundamental paradigm shift from physical bit transmission to personalized semantic service. Considering the importance of personalized features related to the speaker in speech for source recovery and understanding, we propose a semantic-driven framework for personalized speech transmission, named PerSemCom, which combines speaker acoustic features with semantic information. Specifically, we first introduce an efficient semantic extraction mechanism to achieve the conversion from speech to text transcriptions, and design a semantic corrector coupled with multi-domain knowledge to mitigate the effects of wireless channel distortion. Building upon the reliable transcriptions at receiver, we further establish a speaker embedding vector knowledge base and achieve high-fidelity speech reconstruction through quantitative modeling of speaker-specific acoustic features. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms existing schemes in terms of subjective perception at harsh channel conditions. Complexity analysis and latency measurements also show competitive advantages in computational efficiency and real-time capabilities. Reconstructed personalized speech samples have been publicly available at https://kwtankw.github.io/PerSemCom/.