Patent ID: 6707944
Filing Date: 2004-03-16
Classification: H04N

Abstract:
A computational graceful degradation method in an MPEG encoder and decoder system comprising: an encoder including a multimedia object dividing unit for dividing input multimedia into a plurality of objects according to its content and characteristic, a plurality of object encoding units for encoding the corresponding input multimedia objects from the multimedia object dividing unit, a multiplexer for multiplexing a plurality of encoded multimedia object bitstreams to transmit a multiplexed multimedia object bitstream; and a decoder including a demultiplexer for demultiplexing the multiplexed multimedia object bitstream received from the multiplexer to output a plurality of demultiplexed multimedia object bitstream, a plurality of object decoding units for decoding the corresponding multimedia object bitstream applied from the demultiplexer, and a multimedia constructing unit for reconstructing the decoded multimedia objects to generate reconstructed multimedia to user, the method comprising the steps of:determining, in the multiplexer, a priority of the respective objects according to a relative importance between the objects before multiplexing the encoded object bitstream for transmission, considering that the computational graceful degradation will be applied in the decoder; and determining, in the demultiplexer, an amount of computational power to be degraded in different ratio every video object using priority information determined according to the respective objects.