Interactive video distribution systems – Operator interface – To facilitate tuning or selection of video signal
Reexamination Certificate
1997-03-07
2004-04-13
Srivastava, Vivek (Department: 2611)
Interactive video distribution systems
Operator interface
To facilitate tuning or selection of video signal
C725S086000, C348S588000, C345S215000, C345S215000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06721952
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to methods and systems for displaying interactive three-dimensional object movie and panoramas.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The following U.S. Patents have been found in a U.S. Patent Search and are believed to be generally relevant to the field of the invention:
U.S. Pat. No. 4,752,836 June 1988 Blanton et al. . . . 358/342
U.S. Pat. No. 5,396,583 March 1995 Chen et al. . . . 395/127
Interactive three-dimensional object movies and panoramas are becoming increasingly popular in entertainment and advertising over the Internet. These movies and panoramas enable the viewer to interact with the video stream and allow a great deal of functionality, such as the capability to rotate and move objects, zoom in and out, navigate through a panorama, link from one movie to another through the use of hot spots, and much more.
Principles of simulating a panorama from still images on a computer display are described in the following publications:
1. Blanton, K. A., Finlay, W. M., Sinclair, M. J. and Tumblin, J. E.,
Method and Apparatus for Reproducing Video Images to Simulate Movement within a Multi-Dimensional Space
, U.S. Pat. No. 4,752,836, Jun. 21, 1988.
2. Chen, S. E., QuickTime® VR—An Image Based Approach to Virtual Environment Navigation, SIGGRAPH:
Computer Graphics Proceedings
, Annual Conference Series, 1995, 29-38.
3. Chen, S. E. and Miller, G. S. P.,
Cylindrical to Planar Image Mapping using Scanline Coherence
, U.S. Pat. No. 5,396,583, Mar. 7, 1995.
Conventional movies use a sequence of frames as input, and advance one frame at a time. Each time a new frame is to be displayed, it is necessary to clear an image buffer of any old frame data, and load the new frame. A view window is used to display part or all of each frame. Rapid advancement through the frames gives the viewer the appearance of continuous motion. In order to transmit a complete movie from a server to a client computer, it is thus necessary for the client to receive all of the frames, and for the frames to be organized into a sequenced database.
In processing large still images extremely high memory requirements may be encountered. An uncompressed 8{fraction (
1
/
2
)}×11 inch photograph scanned in 24-bit color at 300 dpi requires approximately 25 MB of storage. Transmission of large image files is slow, but even after the files are received by the client computer, displaying them and carrying out simple manipulations are computationally intensive and require large amounts of computer memory. In particular, when viewing a sub-sampled version of the image, scaled to fit in a viewer's monitor screen, the operation of zooming in on a portion of the image can take several minutes on a personal computer containing a PENTIUM® processor.
Ideally, the viewer would like to focus on specific parts of the image and see various parts of the image at different scales, a process known as interactive “gazing.” As zooming progresses, the display shows image tiles of increasingly higher resolution which cover correspondingly smaller areas of the full image. For large images, gazing is an ideal vehicle for information display on a computer monitor, since the image is too large to be displayed in its entirety at full scale. Moreover, whenever a large image is displayed at a low resolution scaled to the size of a computer display screen, the tendency of the viewer is to want to focus in on specific areas at higher resolution; that is, viewers prefer to see portions of the image at higher resolution rather than the full image at low resolution—portions which they can choose themselves. Conventional techniques make this impractical, however, due to the difficulty and slowness of transmitting and manipulating large digital images.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
It is an object of the present invention to enhance the on-line delivery of digital images such as movies and panoramas, by using a novel data structure, which stores pre-manipulated image content in multiple image content units and downloading the data structure in a manner such that any of the stored image content units may be accessed at least a minimum quality prior to completion of downloading.
In accordance with a preferred embodiment of the present invention, the data structure is built by joining all of the image content units together into one large rectangular image. The large image is encoded, transmitted to client computers and decoded on the client computer side.
When the digital image is a movie, each image content unit constitutes a frame and the effect of advancing the frames is accomplished by moving a view window within the large image. The view window being displayed moves in such a way that it maintains the same relative position within each frame within the large image, so that advancement of the view window makes it seem as if the frames were being advanced. This can all be carried out very quickly, faster than if the frames were viewed independently in the conventional manner.
It is another objective of the present invention to enhance the on-line delivery of large still images at multiple resolutions, and to enable fast interactive gazing capability. In large still images, an image content unit may be a tile of the large still image. By applying the invention to multi-resolution tiles making up the image, joined together to form a long horizontal image, the client computer can quickly display a low resolution version of the full image, almost immediately after the data begins to stream, and can zoom in interactively by gazing at areas of interest. The choice as to which areas are of interest is completely in the hands of the producer.
The present invention seeks to simulate an interactive three-dimensional object movie or panorama on a computer display, as data is being received on-line. A multiplicity of individual frames are arranged so as to form a vertical strip. This vertical strip, when entered into the memory as a digital image, can be streamed from a server to a client in horizontal bands, enabling the client to begin viewing the object movie on-line as soon as the first few bands are received, while the server continues to transmit the rest of the data. As more data arrives, the client can view more of the object movie.
In order to view images and video on a computer display, a user, or client, retrieves the media from a storage device or server, typically connected via a network. Bandwidth limitations affect the amount of time required to transmit a video frame from the server to the client, and thus limit the video frame rate. Moreover, when dealing with object movies and panoramas, the images being transmitted are extremely large, so that overcoming bandwidth limitation is a critical enabling factor for the technology, even for high bandwidth networks. Currently, to overcome the limitations, two methods are used: The first is to compress the video frame sequence, thereby speeding up transmission time at the cost of additional processing to decompress the frames prior to display. The second is to copy the entire sequence to an intermediate storage device, such as a hard disk, to which the client has higher bandwidth access, at the cost of delaying the viewing of the video until the entire sequence has been delivered.
It is therefore desirable to provide a method for clients who are linked by a network to a server to view an object movie or panorama on-line. It is also desirable to enable the client to interact with the movie or panorama, by directly controlling the viewing window. A primary advantage of the present invention is to change the layout of the frame sequence from that of typically a long horizontal image in which the frames are joined horizontally left to right, to that of a long vertical image in which the frames are joined vertically top to bottom. The frames are decompressed in sequence as successive horizontal bands are processed. Specifically, the second frame, being positioned underneath the first frame, is only processed after the first frame is complete. Had the fram
Guedalia Isaac David
Guedalia Jacob Leon
Martine & Penilla LLP
Roxio, Inc.
Srivastava Vivek
LandOfFree
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