SafeStep: An Interactive Demonstration of Semantic Communication for Pedestrian Safety Monitoring
2608.27688

Authors

Christian McDowell,Andrea Panebianco,Jeremiah Yang,Sirin Chakraborty,Samuel Chamoun

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.

Resources

Ray graphicRay graphicRay graphicRay graphic

Stay in the loop

Every AI paper that matters, free in your inbox daily.

Details

  • takara.ai
  • Custom AI and machine learning from the Frontier Research Team.
  • © 2026 takara.ai Ltd
  • Content is sourced from third-party publications.
Ray graphicRay graphicRay graphic