Patent ID: 8442337

Claim:
In a motion-compensated, block-transform video encoder, a computer-implemented method comprising: designating an animation video for encoding as an animation content, rather than a natural video; encoding the animation video differently than the natural video, wherein the encoding comprises: detecting edges in the animation video using texture; quantizing the animation video, including changing quantization settings of the video encoder to settings that are different than quantization settings for natural video for areas of the animation video that include the detected edges so as to improve encoding quality of the areas; determining whether the animation content is an intra-coded animation content; applying a different quantization approach for the intra-coded animation content than for animation content that is not intra-coded; for the intra-coded animation content, identifying gradient areas with non-zero AC coefficients and adjusting quantization to preserve significant non-zero AC coefficients in some or all of the identified gradient areas, wherein the adjusting quantization includes reducing quantization step size for the gradient areas; for animation content that is not intra-coded, performing aggressive differential quantization; and outputting the encoded animation video in an encoded video bit stream.