Very Low Frame-Rate Video Streaming For Face-to-Face Teleconference

Providing the best possible face-to-face video over low bandwidth networks is a major challenge for current teleconferencing systems especially when implementing multi-party conversations. With the limitations of fixed webcams and low bandwidth, the transmitted faces may be significantly blurred, even unrecognizable. We describe a novel strategy for real-time coding of face video at a very low frame rate such as one frame per 2-3 seconds. By reducing the frame rate, we transmit high spatial fidelity face video at a very low bit-rate of 8Kb/s, with a reasonable representation of the original video, especially for conversants in "listening" mode. One challenge overcome is selecting which frames to transmit. We provide experimental results that show that our compression strategy provides very low bit-rate face-to-face teleconferencing.