Patent ID: 7489726

Claim:
A method for processing a plurality of videos, comprising: acquiring, in parallel, a plurality of compressed videos, in which compressed frames of each input video are acquired at a fixed sampling rate; applying, concurrently and in parallel, joint analysis to the plurality of compressed videos to determine a variable and non-uniform temporal sampling rate for each compressed video, so that a combined distortion is minimized while a combined frame rate constraint is satisfied for the plurality of compressed videos, in which the combined distortion includes a temporal distortion, and in which the compressed frames are inter-frames; and sampling compressed frames of each compressed video at the associated variable and non-uniform temporal sampling rate to produce a plurality of compressed output videos having variable temporal resolutions, in which the temporal distortion E{Δ 2 Z i,k } between a frame i and frame k is estimated by E ⁢ { Δ 2 ⁢ z i , k } = σ x i 2 ⁢ σ Δ ⁢ ⁢ x i , k 2 + σ y i 2 ⁢ σ Δ ⁢ ⁢ y i , k 2 , where (σ 2 x i ,σ 2 y i ) represent a variances for x and y spatial gradients in frame i, and (σ 2 Δx i,k , σ 2 Δy i,k ) represent variances for motion vectors between the frame i and frame k in x and y direction.