International Business Machines Corporation

Thomas K McCarthy

Cesar Augusto Gonzales

Thomas A Horvath

Krishna Chaitanya Ratakonda

Kimberly Tekavec Bailey

Andy G Lean

Michael W Stayton

Norman H Kreitzer

Rajesh Rajagopalan

A method for managing settings of applications. A request from an application to store runtime settings currently being used by the application is identified. In response to identifying the request, the runtime settings are then stored on in a repository of runtime settings. In one or more examples, the application is running on an operating system on a computer system, and the request is communicated through a common system service of the operating system.

Common system services for managing configuration and other runtime settings of applications

Managing settings of applications is provided. A request from an application to store runtime settings, currently being used by the application, is identified by a processor executing program instructions for managing settings of applications. In response to identifying the request, the runtime settings are then stored on in a repository of runtime settings. In one or more examples, the application is running on an operating system on a computer system, and the request is communicated through a common system service of the operating system.

A method and apparatus, particularly suited to SIMD instruction sets, to filter streaming video information encoded under a predictive encoding algorithm specified under video encoding standards, such as MPEG 4 or H.264/AVC. The filtering operation de-blocks or removes unwanted borders in the perceived video. During the filtering process, a series of filtering mask is generated based on temporal and spatial statistics of predictive encoded video information, which is then recursively applied to the video in order to gate filtered or unfiltered video to an output channel according to coefficients of the masks. The filtering mask effectively yields a decision or rule-based map that transforms the video on a pixel-by-pixel basis thereby avoiding complex and processor-intensive decision tree logic customarily required to process individual pixels of successive macroblocks that may have different filtering requirements.

Method of filtering pixels in a video encoding process

Systems and methods are provided for allocating bits to pictures in accordance with the bit allocation constraints for operation at both constant and variable bit rates. A statistical complexity measure which is an estimate of the average encoding complexity of the entire data is updated after encoding each picture. This set of parameters, along with an estimate of the encoding complexity of the current picture and the desired average coding rate is used to allocate target bits for encoding the current picture. One method of allocating bits to a picture is to used the statistical complexity measure to vary the instantaneous rate of encoding and allocate bits for this picture so as to generate encoded data at this rate. Another method is to modulate the target generated by a conventional encoder using the current level of the Virtual Buffer Verifier and the deviation of the estimated encoding complexity of the current picture from the statistical complexity measures.

Single pass target allocation for video encoding

A sequential process-pipeline has a first processing stage (30) coupled to a CODEC (24) through a plurality of buffers, including an image data input buffer (28), an image data output buffer (26), and an address buffer (34). The image data input buffer stores, for each block of image data, control information for controlling the processing of an associated block of image data. The address buffer stores addresses, each of which identifies an initial address of a block of addresses within an image memory (22). A local controller (18) is responsive to the writing of an address into the address buffer to read the control information for a block to be processed, and to initiate the operation of the CODEC, in accordance with the read-out information, to execute a Discrete Cosine Transformation Process and a Discrete Cosine Transformation Quantization Process.

Sequential pipelined processing for the compression and decompression of

A sequential process-pipeline (12) has a first processing stage (30) coupled to a CODEC (24) through a plurality of buffers, including an image data input buffer (28), an image data output buffer (26), and an address buffer (34). The address buffer stores addresses, each of which identifies an initial address of a block of addresses within an image memory (22). Each block of addresses in the image memory stores a block of decompressed image data. A local controller (18) is responsive to the writing of an address into the address buffer to initiate the operation of the CODEC to execute a Discrete Cosine Transformation Process and a Discrete Cosine Transformation Quantization Process.

Process-pipeline architecture for image/video processing

A system and method for improving the quality of decoded images, without any cost to compression efficiency, in both progressive still frame and motion video applications wherein the images are coded with intraframe transform based coding techniques, such as Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coding. Prediction of the AC components is utilized and operations are performed on the AC coefficient prediction in the decoder portions of the system in combination with a thresholding technique. Input images are subdivided into blocks of pixels, which are changed into blocks of coefficients by forward transform coding resulting in DC coefficients, representative of the average value in a block of pixels, and AC coefficients, representative of harmonic frequencies from the block, whereupon the predicted coefficient values are thresholded and the thresholded coefficient values are added to their corresponding transform coefficient values for the given block. These steps are repeated for all of the blocks of the image and the image representation is recovered by applying an inverse transform operation to the results of all of the additions for all of the blocks of the image.

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Durham, NC, United States of America

Thomas K McCarthy