Patent ID: 6101276
Filing Date: 2000-08-08
Classification: H04N

Abstract:
A method of performing a single path real-time compression and decompression of video data input to a video compression/decompression unit including motion estimation, said video data being apportioned into a plurality of frames including frames identified as reference frames, a subset of said plurality of frames being dependent frames having dependencies on one or more of said reference frames for compression purposes, said method comprising the steps of:first compressing said reference frames as they are input, by using spatial compression techniques;storing said dependent frames in memory until said one or more reference frames have been compressed;performing motion estimation on said dependent frames;dropping selected dependent frames after evaluation if and when said memory is full;replacing dropped frames with synthetic frames similar to a proximate reference frame;retrieving the stored dependent frames from said memory one by one; andresponsive to said reference frames having been compressed, then compressing said dependent frames from said memory.