Patent ID: 6873740

Claim:
A method of coding a plurality of multimedia data comprising the following steps: an acquisition step, for converting said original multimedia data into one or several bitstreams; a structuring step, for capturing the different levels of information in said bitstream(s) by means of analysis and segmentation; a description step, for generating description data of the obtained levels of information; a coding step, allowing to encode the description data thus obtained; wherein said description step comprises: a defining sub-step provided for storing a set of descriptors related to said plurality of multimedia data; and a description sub-step, provided for selecting the description data to be coded in accordance with every level of information as obtained in the structuring step; and said set of descriptors includes at least a shape descriptor and a shape deformation descriptor; wherein the shape descriptor is defined by means of the following characteristics: Centroid (C x , C y ): coordinates of the centroid of the contour; Angle θ: angle between horizontal and main axis of the contour; Size of the original contour N: size of the contour after resampling; Set of ordered Fourier coefficients Z k ′: set of invariant Fourier coefficients; Size of the Fourier coefficients set P: size of the preceding set, with 1<P≦N, P being necessarily odd; Scale: scale parameter; the shape deformation descriptor is defined by means or the following characteristics: Normalized deviation of the scale: normalized deviation of the scale parameter over the video sequence; Maximal size of the original contours N: the maximal size of the original contour sizes N over the video sequence; N is an item of the shape descriptor; Normalized deviations of each Fourier coefficient σ z′k : normalized deviations of each Fourier coefficient over the video sequence; Size of the set of normalized deviations of each Fourier coefficient M: size of the preceding set.