A 64 kbit/s Integrated Visual Communication System--New Communication Medium for the ISDN

Seeing-while-talking has been a dream of mankind for over a 100 years since the invention of telephone. In the past, various trials were performed in spite of the difficulty in installing the network for the actual service. However, with the progress of ISDN and the advancement of digital signal processing technology, the environment has been changing rapidly. In this paper, an integrated visual communication system is described for the enhanced communication service at 64 kbits/s, the fundamental bit rate of ISDN. The roles of state-of-theart compression of the audio and video signals are discussed and an integrated transmission method based on the priority of the information content is proposed.