'LipTelephone' a videophone for the deaf.

This paper describes the 'LipTelephone' system, which is being developed under a Greek AMEA research project, with the purpose to serve as a videophone that can also be used by lip readers. This system aims to combine model-based with traditional coding techniques in order to exploit the information redundancy in a scene of known content, while achieving high fidelity representation in the specific area of interest, which is the speaker's mouth. The recent MPEG-4 coding standard provides the framework, which is employed, for these purposes.