The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Sep. 28, 1999
Filed:
Aug. 28, 1996
Tomio Echigo, Yokohama, JP;
Junji Maeda, Tokyo-to, JP;
Jung-Kook Hong, Tokyo-to, JP;
Mikihiro Ioka, Tokyo-to, JP;
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
Edge information sensitive to a visual characteristic is efficiently stored, block artifacts are reduced, and highly efficient compression is accomplished by an image compressing method. The system encodes a digital image and includes: an image input for inputting the digital image; a segmenter for segmenting the digital image into a plurality of primitive regions and computing parameters about the luminance and chrominances of the primitive region for each the primitive region; a first merger for merging the plurality of primitive regions to generate first-order block candidates and classifying each of the first-order block candidates into any of a plurality of predetermined patterns; a first clusterer for clustering, among the first-order block candidates belonging to the same classification, the first-order block candidates, where the parameters about the luminance and chrominances of the primitive regions thereof can be approximated with linear transformation, as a first-order block, and representing a transformation coefficient of the linear transformation with a parameter; a second merger for merging a plurality of the first-order blocks to generate second-order block candidates and classifying the second-order block candidate in accordance with the pattern of each the first-order blocks of the second-order block candidate; a second clusterer for clustering, among the second-order block candidates belonging to the same classification, the second-order block candidates, where the transformation coefficients of the first-order blocks thereof can be approximated with linear transformation, as a second-order block, and representing a transformation coefficient of the linear transformation with a parameter; a controller for recursively executing the clustering of the block candidates while raising the order of the block in sequence until the clustering of the blocks becomes impossible; and an encoder for encoding the parameters of the coexisting multi-order blocks.