Dr. Li's noteworthy contributions

Compression

Operational rate-distortion (R-D) optimality in embedded coding and sub-bitplane scanning (incorporated into JPEG 2000).
Visual weighting and visual progressive compression (incorporated into JPEG 2000)
Motion Compensated Lifting (a.k.a., Motion compensated temporal filtering) (incorporated into H.264/SVC)
JPEG Interactive Protocol (JPIP) " (incorporated into JPEG 2000, Part 9)
Arbitrary shape wavelet transform with phase alignment " (incorporated into MPEG 4, shape adaptive wavelet coding )
Multiview Image Compression (pioneer work that leads to H.264 MVC)
Scalable audio coding ( incorporated into MPEG 4, audio lossless format )

Communication

Storage