Patent ID: 7352809

Claim:
A video conferencing system, comprising, a plurality of cameras that capture a spatially adjacent scene, an encoding system comprising a plurality of encoders that compress and transmit a plurality of pictures from said plurality of cameras; said encoding system comprising a bit rate control manager coupled to each of said plurality of encoders for determining a bit rate for each of said plurality of encoders such that a quality of the reproduced bit stream produced by each of said plurality of encoders is substantially the same; wherein the quality of the reproduced bit streams is measured by one or more parameters selected from the group consisting of: a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) calculated between a plurality of uncoded source pictures and a plurality of produced reference pictures; a sum of square difference (SSD) calculated between a plurality of uncoded source pictures and a plurality of produced reference pictures; a Sum of Absolute Differences (SAD) calculated between a plurality of uncoded source pictures and a plurality of produced reference pictures.