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:
Apr. 13, 2004
Filed:
Feb. 23, 2000
Jean Margaret Aschenbrenner, Boulder, CO (US);
Stephen Dale Hanna, Longmont, CO (US);
John Thomas Varga, Longmont, CO (US);
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
A method of compressing pixel information is described. The pixel data is received in a data stream and compressed into a compressed data format by identifying a run of consecutive bytes of the data stream based on the similarity of the consecutive data bytes in the data stream. A mode bit of a compression byte is used to indicate whether a run of consecutive bytes is identified. Count bits of the compression byte are used to indicate the number of times the data bytes are repeated and zero counts may be used to indicate particular types of runs, for example, runs to the end of a scan line and the end of an object. Where a pixel byte is represented by 8 bits, the data stream may be compressed in multiples of four bytes at a time. If a pixel is represent by less than 8 bits, the compression method may look for repetitions of similar bytes one byte at a time.