Patent ID: 8015586

Claim:
An image storage and delivery method for recording and reproducing image data from a web camera via a network, the method comprising: a first temporarily storing step of temporarily storing, by the web camera, images in a memory, wherein the web camera takes the images consecutively in time-series; a normal recording step of intermittently receiving, by a storage server, image data from the memory, wherein the storage server records the image data in a first recording channel of a disk device as first data with a first image quality along with time stamps; a second temporarily storing step of temporarily storing, by the web camera, predetermined frames of the images taken by the web camera as second data with a second image quality in a ring buffer memory, and a delivering step of delivering, by the storage server, image data to the client terminal in IP-packet form, wherein the client terminal requests the image data by specifying a channel and a frame number, wherein in response to an alarm, the storage server performs: a requesting step of requesting the web camera to deliver the second data representative of at least one of the images taken before the alarm occurred, and an alarm recording step of recording the second data from the ring buffer memory in a second recording channel of the disk device with the second image quality along with time stamps without stopping the normal recording step, whereby the recorded second data has a higher frame rate than the first data, and a recording period of the second data and a recording period of the first data overlap in an overlapping period, and wherein in response to an instruction for seamless playback, a client terminal performs a reproduction step of receiving both of the first data and the second data of the overlapping period, selecting frames, frame by frame, from the first data and the second data, and reproducing the selected frames along with the time stamps of the selected frames as a continuous video, wherein the reproduction step repeats: a substep of adding an elapsed time from a reproducing start time to a reproduction reference time; a substep of updating a reproducing memory which holds a latest acquired frame and a previous acquired frame for each of the first data and the second data received from the storage server, wherein the updating is performed when a time stamp of a latest acquired frame of either the first data or the second data indicates a time older than the reproducing reference time, by acquiring and receiving a next frame of the latest acquired frame with the older time stamp; and a substep of comparing the time stamps of the previous acquired images of the first data and the second data to output either data as a reproducing data, having a newer time, of the first data and the second data.