Patent ID: 7085319

Claim:
A method of encoding uncompressed video data to form compressed video data wherein the video data comprises a plurality of image frames including a set of reference frames and a set of nonkey frames, wherein the set of nonkey frames are encoded with reference at least to a segmentation of at least one of the image frames in the set of reference frames, and further wherein the segmentation is an assignment of some or all of the pixels of the reference frame to at least one segment based on at least one of a color value or a location of the pixels in the reference frame, the method comprising: encoding a first reference frame; segmenting the first reference frame into a first set of segments; segmenting the first reference frame into a second set of segments, wherein the first set and second set form a hierarchy of segments and each segment encloses a simply connected set of pixels of the first reference frame; matching segments of the hierarchy of segments to pixels of a nonkey frame; encoding into the compressed video data a representation of the nonkey frame according to results of the step of matching.