Data compression method and apparatus
US6058211A · kind A · utility
Assignee
Inventors
Key dates
| Filing date | Jul 5, 1996 |
| Grant date | May 2, 2000 |
| Priority date | — |
| Expiry date | Jul 5, 2016 |
Classification
- Technology area (CPC H)Electricity
- CPC primaryH04N19/20
- WIPO fieldAudio-visual technology
- WIPO sectorElectrical engineering
Abstract
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for compressing digital data, such as the digital representation of a colored image. A scanning routine is described which aims to maintain the integrity of regions of the image that the human visual system also finds important. Pixel data from the image data includes color components, e.g., intensities of three or more colors such as red, green and blue or cyan, magenta and yellow. When the color components of the pixels are represented in color space, the axes of which are the three color components with the intensities thereof as variables, it has been found experimentally, particularly for artificial or synthetic images, that significant regions in the image tend to produce clusters of points in color space. In accordance with the invention, the color space is scanned by a space filling curve to convert the coordinates in color space into a one dimensional matrix such as a histogram. If certain types of space filling curves are used, e.g., a step-wise curve such as the Peano or Hilbert fractal, the clusters of points in color space tend to produce clusters of points in the histogram. Having obtained the histogram, it is se…
Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.