Although 3G communications has been made possible, the prevalence of multimedia communications is still confined by the communication bandwidth. Thus, it is important to have more powerful source coding schemes and to have content-awareness for intelligent communications. Very low bit rate coding (VLBC) schemes have been of great interests to the engineering communications. A specific idea is to estimate the motion of an object (e.g., face, body) at the encoder, transmit them, and reproduce it by animating an avatar at the receiver. We have worked on audio/visual integration for a face avatar and on estimating body motion for a body avatar. In addition, to embed content-awareness in the communication systems, we perform research on analyzing multimedia content and semantic video objects such as human, vehicle, and events, in non-ideal environments.

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