Lucent Technologies Inc.

Agere Systems Guardian Corp.

Paul R Gloudemans

Marc J Beacken

Robert L Doran

Dominick J Imbesi

Elizabeth A Seip

Joseph Punturieri

Paul S Giangrossi

A method for maintaining the relative timing between each of a series of datastreams generated at a first site and transmitted to a second site including the steps of selecting a pulse generated by a clock having a time reference such as time-of-day and marking it with a descriptor. The descriptor and the time reference of the pulse are then transmitted to the second site. Next, a sample, that occurs after the pulse, is identified for each of the datastreams. An offset from the pulse to the next sample is then calculated for each of the datastreams. Next, the descriptor, a pointer to the next sample and the offset for each of the datastrearns is transmitted together with the corresponding datastreams to the second site. Using the pointer, the next sample in each of the datastreams is then located. Finally, the relative timing of each of the series of datastreams is reconstructed based on the next sample and the offset.

Apparatus and method for recovery of relative signal timing

A composite image generator for generating a multi-image composite from a plurality of individual compressed images is disclosed. Multi-image composites are generated from static images or from a video stream with significantly reduced computation, reduced latency for video processing and reduced storage requirements. The individual images may be compressed with a JPEG image encoder or another suitable intraframe image encoder, such as those implementing the MPEG-II standard. In the illustrative embodiment, four (4) individual images of equal size, compressed using the JPEG standard, are combined into a multi-image composite with a single individual image in each quadrant of the composite image. Multi-image composites are created without fully decoding each individual compressed image, by partially decoding the individual compressed images and only fully decoding a small portion of each image. Multi-image composites are created from N individual compressed images by initially decoding the data of the N compressed images only enough to identify where each row of 8.times.8 blocks end, so that the image data may be reordered in an appropriate manner. As each 8.times.8 block is detected, the input image data is copied to the output image data to create the multi-image composite. The desired composite configuration determines the order of processing the N input images. Since each codeword may encode more than one coefficient, and each codeword may be of variable length, detection tables preferably indicate the number of bits encapsulated in each codeword and the number of coefficients represented by these bits. As the input image data is evaluated, the number of coefficients may be counted until all of the coefficients in a block have been processed, or until an end-of-block codeword is detected. The DC difference values at the border of each individual image must be recalculated to reflect the reordering of the pixels, since the DC coefficient in each block is encoded relative to the DC coefficient from the previous block, which will be different for certain blocks in the reordered multi-image composite image.

Method and apparatus for generating a composite image from individual

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Flanders, NJ, United States of America

Paul R Gloudemans