Real Time Image Ltd.

Rtimage Ltd.

Alexander Ovsiankin

Zvika Eintracht

Roman Dementiev

Gil Sideman

Shai Dekel

A system for collaborative document annotation whereby notes (i.e. annotations) associated with a document, such as an image or text document, are stored in a notes database on a central notes server. The documents and associated annotations are treated independently from each other whereby separate data structures are created for the documents and for the associated annotations. A web server application on the server side functions to capture requests from one or more note client applications for creating, storing, editing and retrieving annotations related to specific documents stored on the notes server. On the client side, the notes client functions to display the document that the user wishes to annotate and provides the tools necessary to permit the user to create, edit, delete, retrieve and store notes. A synchronization process transmits the annotations generated by the user from the notes client to the notes server. In response, the notes server transmits back an acknowledgement along with any new notes that other notes clients may have posted since the last synchronization was performed thus enabling multiple notes clients to annotate a document asynchronously with respect to each other. When annotations are posted to the notes server by a notes client, the state of the annotation database is synchronized such that all other notes clients can retrieve the current, up to date annotations associated with a document.

Synchronizing/updating local client notes with annotations previously made by other clients in a notes database

The imaging system that is described below is an image streaming system which is different from traditional compression systems. It eliminates the necessity to store a compressed version of the original image, by streaming ROI data using the original stored image. The imaging system of the present invention also avoids the computationally intensive task of compression of the full image. Instead, once a user wishes to interact with a remote image, the imaging server performs a fast preprocessing step in near real time after which it can respond to any ROI requests also in near real time. When a ROI request arrives at the server, a sophisticated progressive image encoding algorithm is performed, but not for the full image. Instead, the encoding algorithm is performed only for the ROI. Since the size of the ROI is bounded by the size and resolution of the viewing device at the client and not by the size of the image, only a small portion of the full progressive coding computation is performed for a local area of the original image. This local property is also true for the client. The client computer performs decoding and rendering only for ROI and not the full image. This real time streaming or Pixels-On-Demand&trade; architecture requires different approaches even to old ideas. For example, similarly to some prior art, the present imaging system is based on wavelets. But while in other systems wavelet bases are selected according to their coding abilities, the choice of wavelet bases in the present imaging system depends more on their ability to perform well in the real time framework. The system of the present invention supports several modes of progressive transmission: by resolution, by accuracy and by spatial order.

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Lod, Israel

Alexander Ovsiankin