Sport Action Coding

• US 20070198906A1
• Filed: 02/13/2007
• Published: 08/23/2007
• Est. Priority Date: 02/13/2006
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Grass Valley USA Incorporated
• Original Assignee: Snell and Wilcox Limited (Belden Inc.)
• Inventors: Knee, Michael
• Granted Patent: US 8,290,042 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 714/803
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 19/124 Quantisation
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 19/132 Sampling, masking or truncation of coding units, e.g. adaptive resampling, frame skipping, frame interpolation or high-frequency transform coefficient masking
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 19/152 by measuring the fullness of the transmission buffer
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 19/17 the unit being an image region, e.g. an object
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 19/18 the unit being a set of transform coefficients
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 19/61 in combination with predictive coding
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 19/85 using pre-processing or post-processing specially adapted for video compression

Abstract

A method of compressing data representing a sequence of images in dependence upon data defining at least one region of particular interest within at least one image in the sequence includes causing data representing an image region that is not of particular interest to be more highly compressed than data representing an image regions that is of particular interest.

Claims

1. A method of compressing data representing a sequence of images in dependence upon data defining at least one region of particular interest within at least one image in the sequence, the method comprising causing data representing an image region outside the at least one region of particular interest to be more highly compressed than data representing an image region inside the at least one region of particular interest.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising at least one of spatially filtering and temporally filtering image regions outside said at least one region of particular interest prior to compression.

3. The method of claim 1, where the compressed image data includes data representing at least one of differences between images in the sequence that have been spatially or temporally filtered, and prediction errors derived from such images, and wherein the compressed image data also includes data representing at least one unfiltered image in the sequence.

4. The method of claim 3, in which the data representing at least one difference between images and prediction errors comprises at least one of MPEG P and B frames, and wherein the data prepresenting at least one unfiltered image comprises MPEG I-frames.

5. The method of claim 1, in which compression is achieved by allocating less data to the description of visually unimportant video features, wherein the allocation of data to such features is reduced outside the at least one region of interest.

6. The method of claim 5, in which the visually unimportant video features are high spatial frequency components.

7. The method of claim 5, in which the data reduction is only applied to data describing at least one of differences between images, and prediction errors derived from images in the sequence.

8. The method of claim 7, in which the data reduction is applied to at least one of MPEG P and B frames.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein causing data to be more highly compressed comprises transform-coding at least one of quantizing, attenuating and deleting transform coefficients.

10. The method of claim 1, in which the data representing a sequence of images comprises compressed video data.

11. A video compression pre-processor having:

a video input, and

a mask input identifying at least one area of interest within an image represented by video provided through the video input,

wherein the video is processed in dependence upon the mask input.

12. The video compression pre-processor claim 11, in which the video is at least one of spatially filtered and temporally filtered in dependence upon the mask input.

13. An apparatus for compressing data representing a sequence of images in dependence upon data defining at least one region of particular interest within at least one image in the sequence, the apparatus being configured to provide data representing a image region outside the at lest one region of particular interest that is more highly compressed than data representing an image region inside the at least one region of particular interest.

14. The video compression apparatus of claim 13, wherein image regions outside said at least one region of particular interest are spatially or temporally filtered prior to compression.

15. The video compression apparatus of claim 13, wherein the compressed image data includes data representing at least one of differences between images in the sequence that have been at least one of spatially and temporally filtered, and prediction errors derived from such images, and wherein the compressed image data further includes data representing unfiltered images in the sequence.

16. The video compression apparatus of claim 15, wherein the data representing at least one of differences between images, and prediction errors comprises a frame selected from the group consisting of MPEG P and B frames and wherein the data representing unfiltered images comprises MPEG I-frames.

17. The video compression apparatus of claim 13, wherein compression is achieved by allocating less data to the description of visually unimportant features, wherein the allocation of data to such features is reduced outside the at least one region of particular interest.

18. The video compression apparatus of claim 17, wherein the visually unimportant video features are high spatial frequency components.

19. The video compression apparatus of claim 17, in which the data reduction is only applied to data describing at least one of differences between images in the sequence and prediction errors derived from images in the sequence.

20. The video compression apparatus of claim 19, in which the data reduction is applied to frames selected from the group consisting of MPEG P and B frames.

21. The video compression apparatus of claim 13, wherein the data compressions is achieved by transform-coding and at least one of quantization, attenuation and delection of transform coefficients.

22. The video compression apparatus of claim 13, wherein the data representing a sequence of images is compressed video data.