IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications Call for Papers Very Low Bit-rate Video Coding Technology advances and application demands lead to the inevitable merging of telecommunications and computing areas. Future user requirements are anticipated to be dominated by video-driven applications, with demands for a very high degree of flexibility and extensibility. Applications will include real-time, high quality interactivity using natural and/or synthetic video data over limited bandwidth communication lines and access of limited capacity storage media, providing ability to achieve scalability with fine granularity in spatial and temporal resolution and complexity. Such demands will require robust and efficient very low bit-rate video coding approaches, able to support resilient transmission/accessing of very high quality video pictures. Current video processing technologies and international standards will not be able to cope with such requirements because of well known limitations, e.g., block and mosquito artifacts. The development and evolution of alternative video coding techniques and video processing systems is necessary. The nature of the required research poses a number of challenges in algorithm development and specification and development of coding tools which will allow a very high degree of application-specific functionality, evolution of processing (especially highly parallel) architectures to efficiently support the required operations, etc. The IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications is developing an issue with the broad theme of very low bit-rate video coding. This issue will include, but is not limited to, papers on the following topics: Very low bit-rate video coding techniques for video transmission and storage content-based model-based vector quantisation wavelets fractals Scalability issues in very low bit-rate coding Very low bit-rate coding of hybrid (video and synthetic) data Very low bit-rate video coding for multimedia (e.g. stereoscopic images and 3D views) Robustness of very low bit-rate video coding in error-prone environments Processing architectures for very low bit-rate video coding. Prospective authors of original work should submit six (6) copies of their manuscripts to one the Guest Editors listed below, according to the following schedule: six (6) copies of the full manuscript September 1, 1996 notification of decisions December 1, 1996 final version of the manuscript Feburary 1, 1997 publication date Fourth quarter 1997 Guest Editors Dr. Kazumasa Enami Dr. Argyros (Argy) Krikelis Science and Technical Research Labs Aspex Microsystems Ltd. Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) Brunel University 1-10-11 Kinuta, Setagaya-ku, Tokyo 157 Uxbridge, UB8 3PH JAPAN United Kingdom Tel: +81 3 54942300 Tel: +44 1895 274000 ext 2763 Fax: +81 3 54942309 Fax: +44 1895 258728 E-mail: enami@strl.nhk.or.jp E-mail:Argy.Krikelis@aspex.co.uk Argy.Krikelis@brunel.ac.uk Prof. Todd R. Reed Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering University of California Davis, CA 95616 USA Tel:+1 (916) 7524720 Fax:+1 (916) 7528428 E-mail:trreed@ucdavis.edu