Patent ID: 6738356
Filing Date: 2004-05-18
Classification: G06T,H04L,H04N

Abstract:
An object oriented video merging system for use in teleconferencing, where a plurality of video objects are contained within the active video frames of a plurality of video stream from a plurality of different sources, at any instant in time, where at least an object from one discrete video stream is to be merged into a composite video output signal for return to a plurality of selected sources at each instant in time, and where each object in each video frame is describable by polynomials which define two-dimensional shapes; said system comprising:a system controller; clock means for generating a clock pulse stream; a plurality of video processing units for periodically processing video data from a plurality of video sources; frame synchronization means for ensuring synchronization of video frames in each said video processing unit; a common video bus into which an object from one discrete video stream is merged at any instant in time from a respective video processing unit communicating therewith; an object description generator for each video stream being processing by each respective video processor; a video priority determinator in said system controller for determining the priority of each video stream at each instant in time; video selector means in each video processing unit for permitting an object from the video stream being processed by the respective video processing unit to be transmitted to said common video bus only if the priority of that video stream at any instant in time permits such transmission.