Patent ID: 8447123

Claim:
A method for selecting in a picture encoding apparatus a scan path for the elements of a block in spatial domain picture encoding, said method comprising the steps: determining in said picture encoding apparatus in a current block, starting from a pre-defined corner element in said block, how many zero amplitude values of the corner elements said block contains when proceeding in clockwise direction, or as an alternative in counter-clockwise direction, and upon determining the first corner element having a non-zero amplitude, forming a run-level value pair wherein the ‘run’ value corresponds to the number of preceding zero-amplitude corner elements in said current block and the ‘level’ value corresponds to the amplitude of said first non-zero amplitude corner element; based on said ‘run’ value, selecting in said picture encoding apparatus for said current block a specific one from a group of pre-defined different scan paths for the remaining elements in said current block.