Abstract

Very-low bandwidth video-conferencing, which is the simultaneous transmission of speech and pictures (face-to-face communication) of the communicating parties, is a challenging application requiring an integrated effort of computer vision and computer graphics. This paper consists of two major parts. First, we present the outline of a simple approach to video-conferencing relying on an example-based hierarchical image compression scheme. In particular, we discuss the use of example images as a model, the number of required examples, faces as a class of semi-rigid objects, a hierarchical model based on decomposition into different time-scales, and the decomposition of face images into patches of interest. In the second part, we present several algorithms for image processing and animation as well as their experimental evaluation. Among the original contributions of this paper is an automatic algorithm for pose estimation and normalization. Experiments suggest interesting estima...

Citations