Pulse or digital communications – Bandwidth reduction or expansion – Television or motion video signal
Reexamination Certificate
1998-03-30
2001-01-23
Le, Vu (Department: 2713)
Pulse or digital communications
Bandwidth reduction or expansion
Television or motion video signal
C345S215000, C382S293000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06178204
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates to image signal processing generally and particularly to systems for providing compressed digital video signals representative of a full color video signal.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Image data compression is concerned with minimizing the number of bits required to represent an image. Some of the well-known methods are in the areas of pixel coding, predictive coding and transform coding.
Although image compression methods or systems exploit redundancy in the image data and attempt to pack large amount of information into a small number of samples, they often lack the intelligence to determine which object in a particular image needs to be displayed clearly. Such intelligence is important in today's commonly used audiovisual conferencing systems due to these systems' inherent cost and bandwidth constraints. More specifically, many of the audiovisual conferencing systems are based on International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standards such as H.320, published in March, 1993, H.324, published in January, 1996 or H.323, published May, 1996 and thrive on being affordable and operable on a personal computer systems. Consequently, the video compression and decompression schemes in these standards do not require as intensive computation and elaborate buffering mechanism as other more advanced image compression methods. Thus, the resulting images are often not distinctly sharp. Moreover, the line speeds to these said conferencing systems often range in the 20 kps to 384 kps. Because of the limited number of data bits available for compressing and transmitting video information, the processed images frequently lack clarity and suffer low frame rates.
Low image quality has hampered the uses of these conferencing systems. For example, a patent attorney may have trouble seeing drawings on a scientist's white board through an audiovisual conference. Similarly, a telecommuter may have trouble viewing the agenda being displayed on the conference room's projector screen. In order to overcome these problems without violating the same aforementioned cost and bandwidth constraints, an apparatus and method is needed to allow an user to select a region-of-interest and display said region with as much clarity as possible under the circumstances.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
An improved method and apparatus for generating a user selected region-of-interest in detail is disclosed. In one embodiment, after a user has selected a region-of-interest, a video decoder in the system translates the selected region to correspond to horizontal and vertical coordinates recognizable both by the system's video decoder and the video encoder. Then the video decoder transmits the coordinates to the video encoder. After the video encoder receives the coordinates, the encoder allocates bits originally for representing compressed video information outside the coordinates to represent compressed video information within the coordinates.
REFERENCES:
patent: 5335296 (1994-08-01), Larkin et al.
patent: 5598209 (1997-01-01), Cortjens et al.
patent: 5600373 (1997-02-01), Chui et al.
patent: 5621429 (1997-04-01), Yamaashi et al.
patent: 5793379 (1998-08-01), Lapidous
patent: 5880728 (1999-03-01), Yamaashi et al.
patent: 5990940 (1999-11-01), Hashimoto et al.
patent: 4006324622 (1994-11-01), None
patent: 407327151 (1995-12-01), None
patent: 410023375 (1998-01-01), None
Wei et al, “A Universal High Performance Digital Performance Television Controller”, IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, vol. 36, iss. 3, published Aug. 1990.
Harrand et al, “A Single Chip Videophone Encoder/Decoder”, IEEE International 41st ISSCC, published Feb. 1995.
International Telecommunication Union H.323, “Visual Telephone Systems and Equipment for Local Area Networks Which Provide A Non-Guaranteed Quality of Service”, p. 11, May 28, 1996.
International Telecommunication Union H.261, “Video Codec for Audiovisual Services at P+64 kbits”, p. 5, Mar. 1993.
International Telecommunication Union H.320, “Narrow-Band Visual Telephone Systems and Terminal Equipment”, Mar. 1993.
International Telecommunication Union H.324, “Terminal for low bit rate Multimedia Communication”, Mar. 1996.
Intel Corporation
Le Vu
Su Gene
LandOfFree
Adaptive control of video encoder's bit allocation... does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this patent.
If you have personal experience with Adaptive control of video encoder's bit allocation..., we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Adaptive control of video encoder's bit allocation... will most certainly appreciate the feedback.
Profile ID: LFUS-PAI-O-2515254