Abstract: The recognition method is applied to visual telephony image coding. Matrices of digital samples relevant to the individual frames of the video transmission are submitted to a first processing whereby the foreground region containing the figure is identified. The information concerning the elements of such a region is then processed by edge recognition algorithms to detect a group of elements possibly belonging to the contour. The group of elements is analyzed to select a sequence of elements distributed on the average along a line. The sequency of elements is processed by a neural network to build up the continuous contour which is then coded.