Patent ID: 7116717

Claim:
A method for defining a compression scheme of a media stream, comprising: determining a plurality of compression levels for the media stream and a relationship between valid values of compressed representations of the media stream, each compressed representation of the media stream associated with one of the compression levels; defining a highest level of compression of the compression levels as a base level; and defining enhancement data for representing a relationship between the valid values of compressed representations of the media stream by defining p th layer enhancement data for valid values of a pair of (p−1) th and p th compressed representations of the media stream, if a reconstruction of valid values of the p th compressed representation of the media stream requires the p th layer enhancement data, where p ranges between 2 and k, k reflecting the number of compression levels; wherein the media stream is defined as an original media stream; and wherein the p th layer enhancement data is responsive to valid values of the original media stream being associated with valid values of both the p th and the (p−1) th compressed representation of the media stream.