Hemiface mirroring: a new approach to reducing bandwidth requirements of audiovisual telecommunication

Research has shown that the sight of a speaker\´s face can dramatically improve the intelligibility of speech. The addition of a video stream to telecommunications systems is, therefore, a highly desirable goal. Extending the content-based coding paradigm of MPEG-4, we present a novel method of reducing the amount of data required to represent video images of human speakers. This method is based around the mirroring of vertical halves of the speaker\´s face. We report an experiment that compared video of synthesized speaking faces (constructed by mirroring hemifaces) with that of "normal" (un-manipulated) speaking faces. The results of the experiment show that the synthesized faces provided the same benefits to speech perception as the normal faces. Development of this technique as an image-coding technique for audiovisual telecommunication applications is discussed