Recent Patents in Signal Processing (June 2011) - Video Compression

Beginning with our June 2011 edition, we are changing the format of the "Recent Patents" coverage. So far, we have simply listed patents issued in the previous 30 days from various signal processing areas. We believe that a much better way to cover recent patents is to highlight a particularly interesting area in signal processing, and provide a listing of the patents that have recently been issued in that area. The aim of this exercise is two fold: (1) To draw attention to an interesting field in which research and development is taking place, and (2) to highlight the most popular topics within that field.

Accordingly, for our June 2011 edition we focus on patents in the area of Video Compression. The selection below includes patents issued within the past year, which happen to cover predictive coding, transforms, 3D video displays, and entropy coding techniques. If you have an interesting patent to share when we feature video-related patents the next time, or if you are especially interested in a signal processing research field that you would want to be highlighted in this section, please send email to Shantanu Rane (rane AT merl DOT com).

US 7,953,160, “Method and apparatus for compressing video sequences”, by D. Gordon et al., filed 12 March 2009, issued May 31, 2011, assigned to Comcast IP Holdings I, LLC (Wilmington, DE).

US 7,953,152, “Video compression and encoding method” by E. Ameres et al., filed 28 June 2005, issued 31 May 2011, assigned to Google Inc. (Mountain View, CA).

US 7,949,049, “Memory efficient 3-D wavelet transform for video coding without boundary effects”, by J. Zu et al., filed 6 August 2004, issued 24 May 2004, assigned to Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, WA).

US 7,874,678, “Projected autostereoscopic lenticular 3-D system”, by S. Hines, filed 2 July 2008, issued 25 January 2011, assigned to S. Hines (Glendale, CA).

US 7,920,629, “Context-adaptive VLC video transform coefficients encoding/decoding methods and apparatuses”, by G. Bjontegaard and K. Lillevold, filed 25 August 2006, issued 5 April 2011, assigned to RealNetworks, Inc. (Seattle, WA).

US 7,912,306, “Variable length coding for clustered transform coefficients in video compression”, by W-h. Chen et al., filed 25 November 2009, issued 22 March 2011, assigned to Cisco Technology, Inc. (San Jose, CA) .

US 7,715,480, “Video encoding with motion-selective wavelet transform”, by B. Wang et al., filed 17 October 2003, issued 11 May 2010, assigned to Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc. (Cambridge, MA) .

US 7,881,371, “Block transform and quantization for image and video coding” by H. Malvar, filed 25 February 2005, issued 1 February 2011, assigned to Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, WA).

US 7,894,530, “Method and system for dynamic selection of transform size in a video decoder based on signal content”, by S. Gordon, filed 15 April 2005, issued 22 February 2011, assigned to Broadcom Corporation (Irvine, CA).

US 7,949,196, “Low complexity and unified transforms for video coding” by F. Bossen, filed 13 OCtober 2009, issued 24 May 2011, assigned to NTT Docomo, Inc. (Tokyo, JP).