  In this letter, we envision a new metaverse communication paradigm for
virtual avatar faces, and develop the semantic face compression with compact 3D
facial descriptors. The fundamental principle is that the communication of
virtual avatar faces primarily emphasizes the conveyance of semantic
information. In light of this, the proposed scheme offers the advantages of
being highly flexible, efficient and semantically meaningful. The semantic face
compression, which allows the communication of the descriptors for artificial
intelligence based understanding, could facilitate numerous applications
without the involvement of humans in metaverse. The promise of the proposed
paradigm is also demonstrated by performance comparisons with the
state-of-the-art video coding standard, Versatile Video Coding. A significant
improvement in terms of rate-accuracy performance has been achieved. The
proposed scheme is expected to enable numerous applications, such as digital
human communication based on machine analysis, and to form the cornerstone of
interaction and communication in the metaverse.
