Intel Corporation

Arris Enterprises LLC

Arris Group, Inc.

Eg Technology, Inc.

Joe Monaco

Santhana Krishnamachari

Sam John

John Hartung

Yucel Altunbasak

Thomas R Gardos

Nikil Jayant

Martin Sauser

Chris Elliott

James Pawlyk

Cham Ith

Alexander D Raji

Ramesh V Panchagnula

Jungfeng Bai

Tse Hua Lan

Chris Elliot

James Pawlky

The disclosed invention is a enhancement to the Video Encoder component of the MPEG standard to improve both the efficiency and quality of the video presentation at the display device. The inventions described below pertain to the enhancement of video compression technology. In general, they are compatible with MPEG video standards (as in current art), but represent novel enhancements thereof. The above inventions apply to several transmission media and networks including cable, DSL, wireless, satellite and IP networks. Another category of invention in this disclosure enhances networking performance by recognizing that the transmitted information is video, rather than data. This invention can be scaled to other classes of multimedia data such as speech or audio or images.

Efficient compression and transport of video over a network

Methods and systems for integrated transcoding on a plurality of data channels to convert one or more data channels from an incoming encoding format to an outgoing encoding format are disclosed.

Integrated transcoding

Provided is an enhancement to the Video Encoder component of the MPEG standard to improve both the efficiency and quality of the video presentation at the display device.

Blocks of video images are characterized as being part of either scene foreground or background for encoding. The foreground/background segmentation analysis involves a pixel level and a block level. During the pixel level, interframe differences corresponding to each original image are thresholded to generate an initial pixel-level mask. A first morphological filter is applied to the initial pixel-level mask to generate a filtered pixel-level mask. During the block level, the filtered pixel-level mask is thresholded to generate an initial block-level mask. A second morphological filter is preferably applied to the initial block-level mask to generate a filtered block-level mask. Each element of the filtered block-level mask indicates whether the corresponding block of the original image is part of the foreground or background. In a preferred embodiment, both morphological filters filter out isolated mask elements.

Encoding video images using foreground/background segmentation

A background region of the current image is compared to a reference region to characterize the gain associated with the current image. The values of the unsaturated background pixels of the current image are then adjusted to correct for the characterized gain before encoding the current image. In a preferred embodiment, the reference region is generated based on the previous n frames in the video sequence.

Gain correction for encoding video images

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Atlanta, GA, United States of America

Joe Monaco