Patent ID: 8089502

Claim:
A video telephone system, comprising: a first videophone having a first camera connected to a first encoder and a first transmitter, and having a first decoder connected to a first display; the first videophone in communication with a second videophone, the second videophone having a second camera connected to a second encoder and a second transmitter, and having a second decoder connected to a second display; the first encoder and first decoder of the first videophone and the second encoder and second decoder of the second videophone being interconnected by a network for video communication, wherein said first and second encoders are adaptively responsive to network-caused errors in said communication to provide real-time error recovery, wherein each of the first and second encoders is responsive to image video signals from its corresponding camera to encode data packets representing an image corresponding to the image video signals, wherein each of the first and second encoders produce additional data packets that represent only the differences between a first reference image frame and subsequent image frames, wherein, when an error produces an incorrectly decoded reference image frame, the first and/or second encoder will encode said subsequent image frames based upon previously known, correctly decoded frames.