Abstract

Visible light communication (VLC) can reduce radio-frequency (RF) congestion in indoor industrial monitoring, but a short transmitted payload does not by itself prove that visual or task-relevant information has been preserved. This study therefore frames the proposed method as an autoencoder-based compact latent-payload transmission scheme and explicitly distinguishes it from channel-aware joint source-channel coding (JSCC). Raw red–green–blue (RGB), lossless Huffman, and autoencoder latent payloads are first compared under the same VLC model using bit error rate (BER), calculated/model-derived VLC transmission energy, reconstruction quality, and task utility. The 128-component latent representation contains 4096 bits, corresponding to a 294-fold payload-size reduction relative to an uncompressed 224×224, 24-bit RGB image; this ratio is used only as a raw-payload reference and not as a general codec-compression claim. An independent industrial-domain audit is conducted on 30 Northeastern University (NEU) steel-surface images using four-fold out-of-fold evaluation, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index measure (SSIM), and a fixed defect-class proxy. An NEU architecture-and-resolution comparison shows that changing from Compact-NEU to the full 224×224 model increases PSNR from 14.12 dB to 15.61 dB at the same 4096-bit bottleneck, while a regularized full model gives the highest SSIM of 0.471. Because input resolution and network capacity both change in this comparison, the result is interpreted as evidence that the architecture/resolution setting contributes to the industrial-domain gap, not as a strict isolation of capacity alone. Finally, an end-to-end JSCC-VLC baseline with 4096 nonnegative optical channel uses is trained through a differentiable intensity channel. It obtains 23.82 dB/0.568 SSIM in the clean case and 22.18 dB/0.519 SSIM at 5 dB SNR, showing more channel-aware behavior and more graceful degradation than the separated serialized-latent pipeline. Overall, the results support the modeled energy and active-time benefits of compact latent payloads while showing that robust industrial visual transmission requires architecture/resolution controls, practical codec baselines, and channel-aware JSCC comparisons.

IPC Classification

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