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:
Jun. 05, 2018
Filed:
Sep. 29, 2015
Rgb Systems, Inc., Anaheim, CA (US);
Peter Lionel Smith, Bromley, GB;
RGB SYSTEMS, INC., Anaheim, CA (US);
Abstract
The present invention is a method and apparatus for adaptively compressing and transmitting streaming video, preferably implemented in hardware as part of a codec, that adaptively applies a variable rate of compression to images in a video stream to optimize the quality attainable for a given transport bandwidth. In one or more embodiments, image frames from the video stream are divided into blocks, and a variable compression ratio compression engine compresses the blocks for transmission over a network. Depending on their compressed sizes, one or more of the compressed blocks are packaged into fixed size data packets for transmission over a network. The data packets are fed into a packet buffer. A packet servo releases packets from the buffer to achieve a desired transport data rate. The amount of compression applied by the compression engine is controlled based on the number of packets in the buffer. In one or more embodiments, a plurality of indexed compression vectors are predefined for the compression engine that provide increasing amounts of compression. In one or more embodiments, the index of the compression vector used by the compression engine is incremented when the buffer level of the packet buffer increases, and decremented when the buffer level decreases. In this manner the compression applied by the compression engine automatically adapts to changing entropy within the images of the video stream to optimize the video quality for a given transport data rate.