A real-time low frame-rate video compression system and method that allows the user to perform face-to-face communication through an extremely low bandwidth network. At the encoder side, the system is able to automatically select only a few good faces from the original sequence with high visual quality and compress and transmit them. At the decoder side, the system use image-morphing based rendering method to generate a normal frame-rate video. Experimental results show that the system is superior to more traditional video codecs for low bit-rate face-to-face communication.