Patent ID: 7933955

Claim:
A method for sharing an image on a display screen of a computing system, the method comprising: sending a request to host a screen-sharing session from a browser program running on the computing system to a server on a network; receiving over the network, in response to the request to host the screen-sharing session, a web page with embedded program code for use in capturing images displayed on the display screen; executing the embedded program code by one or more plugins supported by the browser program to host the screen-sharing session; hosting the screen-sharing session entirely through the browser program and the one or more plugins supported by the browser program by executing the embedded program code to repeatedly capture images displayed over time on the display screen of the computing system and to send image data corresponding to the captured images to the server on the network; determining based on a given snapshot of the display screen that image data has changed from a previous snapshot of the display screen; and adaptively selecting, in response to location on the display screen of the changed image data, an algorithm from a plurality of algorithms for isolating each sub-image of the given snapshot that contains some of the changed image data, a first algorithm of the plurality of algorithms comprising subdividing a captured image corresponding to the given snapshot of the display screen into sub-images of appropriate size for transmission to the server and examining each sub-image in sequence to determine whether that sub-image encompasses some of the changed image data, and a second algorithm of the plurality of algorithms comprising subdividing the captured image corresponding to the given snapshot of the display screen into sub-image quadrants and recursively subdividing each sub-image quadrant containing some of the changed image data into sub-image quadrants until a sub-image quadrant containing changed image data is of appropriate size for transmission to the server.