Patent ID: 7352808

Claim:
A method for predictively encoding digital video sequences, comprising: dynamically determining the resolution of a current frame being encoded and outputting the determination, the selection being based on statistical and coding information of a plurality of frames, including at least one previous frame and the current frame; and, selecting encoding parameters and encoding a current frame at a chosen resolution, wherein the encoding parameter selection step takes into account the determination of the dynamic resolution selection step in determining the encoding parameters, wherein the statistical information includes scene-change information and estimated motion information, and the coding information includes a measure of the quantization used by the frames and a measure of the availability of bits, and, wherein the dynamic resolution is further based on functional conditions based on the statistical and coding information, on the basis of which the resolution selection is performed are different for a low-to-high resolution switch as compared to a high-to-low resolution switch, the method further comprising: determining if a low-to-high resolution switch being affected is given by the following condition, the switch being affected if the condition C 2 evaluates to TRUE C 2 ={Q.M 2 >T QM }AND{ B dec >T B2 }AND{ F curr −F sc >T sc } where Q is a measure of the quantization scales used to encode a plurality of previous frames, M is a measure of the motion present in a plurality of previous frames and the current frame, B dec is a measure of the decoder buffer fullness, where F curr and F sc are the frame numbers of the current frame and the last scene-change frame respectively and T QM , T B2 and T SC are preset thresholds.