Method and Apparatus for Enhancing and Adding Context to a Video Call Image

A video-telephony system comprising:

• a video capture unit having a video signal as output;
• a user interface;
• a style selector, responsive to the user interface and having a style description as output;
• and
• a network transmitter that transmits the style description and the video signal over a network to a recipient terminal,
• wherein the style description defines at least one style property selected from the group of style properties consisting of a cropping region, a border style, an image filter, a background and an animation.

A video-telephony system, comprising:

• a means for receiving a video sequence of a video telephony call from a network;
• a means for receiving a style description from the network;
• and
• a means for rendering the video sequence in accordance with the style description, wherein the style description defines at least one style property selected from the group of style properties consisting of a cropping region, a border style, an image filter, a background and an animation.