Patent ID: 8040949

Claim:
A video encoder comprising: a coder for encoding vectors to describe at least an image block with respect to at least a reference block; a short term reference block buffer storing at least one short term reference block; and at least one long term reference block buffer storing at least one long term reference block; wherein the coder selectively chooses between encoding with respect to the at least one short term reference block in the short term reference block buffer and the at least one long term reference block in the long term reference buffer based upon one or more factors examined at the time of encoding to improve one of compression, video quality, and a metric balancing compression and video quality, wherein the at least one long term reference block buffer comprise a multiple frame buffer, and the encoder coder selectively chooses between coding using the reference block (INTER coding) and using INTRA coding, and wherein the coder chooses between two types of INTER coding and the INTRA coding, the two types of INTER coding comprising coding using the at least one short term long term reference block (ST) and the at least one long term long term reference block (LT), and wherein; the coder computes moments for the INTRA coding and the ST block using a recursive optimal per pixel estimate treating elements of a previous block as a random variable; and the coder computes moments for the LT block using a recursive optimal per pixel estimate treating elements of a previous block as a random variable.