Patent ID: 7995657

Claim:
A concentric water ring scan apparatus applied to an image encoding/decoding system, comprising: a concentric water ring origin point determining means for determining a concentric water ring origin point, a concentric water ring ( 0 ), in an image frame; a concentric water ring location determining means for determining the location of the i th concentric water ring, a concentric water ring (i) that surrounds the concentric water ring origin point, i being an integer between 1 and N where N is at least 2; and a concentric water ring quality factor (OF) determining means for determining OF values of the concentric water ring origin point and the concentric water ring based on significance of the concentric water ring origin point and the concentric water ring, wherein the OF values decrease as a function of the distance of each concentric water ring (i) from the concentric water ring origin point.