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:
Mar. 21, 2006
Filed:
Feb. 01, 2000
Anil M. Murching, Beaverton, OR (US);
Thumpudi Naveen, Redmond, WA (US);
Ali Tabatabai, Beaverton, OR (US);
Anil M. Murching, Beaverton, OR (US);
Thumpudi Naveen, Redmond, WA (US);
Ali Tabatabai, Beaverton, OR (US);
Thomson Licensing, Boulogne-Billancourt, FR;
Abstract
A method of extracting regions of homogeneous color from a digital picture divides the digital picture into blocks and generates a feature vector for each block as a set of moments of the data for the block. The distance between the feature vector of each block and the feature vectors of the nearest neighboring blocks are determined using either a weighted Euclidean distance metric or a probability mass function-based distance metric. The maximum distance is the gradient value for the block, and the set of gradient values over all the blocks form a color gradient field. The gradient field is digitized and smoothed, and then segmented into regions of similar color characteristics using a watershed algorithm.