Patent ID: 7797160

Claim:
A signal compression method for compressing an original video signal which has been provided in advance and which is represented as a sequence of multi-dimensional vectors to convert the original signal into a compressed signal, comprising: an initial sub-signal creation step of creating sub-signals by dividing the original signal into the sub-signals in a time domain so as not to overlap with each other, wherein the original video signal represents a sequence of images of a physical domain captured by an imaging device; a created sub-signal selection step of, for each of the sub-signals which have been produced by the initial sub-signal creation step, setting a segmentation boundary shiftable range which includes a segmentation boundary between the sub- signals produced by the initial sub-signal creation step, calculating an average value of dimensionality of compressed signals which are obtained from the sub-signals produced by the initial sub-signal creation step, and extracting segmentation boundary candidates from the segmentation boundary shiftable range, the average value of dimensionality of compressed signals which are obtained from sub-signals which are determined by each of the segmentation boundary candidates being smaller than the average value of dimensionality of the compressed signals which are obtained from the sub-signals produced by the initial sub-signal creation step; a sub-signal re-creation step of determining upon a created sub-signal which is actually to be used, using the segmentation boundary candidates which have been produced by the created sub-signal selection step; a compression mapping determination step of determining, from only the respective sub-signals which have been produced by the sub-signal re-creation step, different mappings for calculation of a compressed signal corresponding to the respective sub-signals; and a signal compression step of calculating a compressed signal which corresponds to each of the sub-signals which have been obtained by the sub-signal re- creation step, based upon the mappings which have been obtained by the compression mapping determination step, to reduce the dimensionality of each of the multi- dimensional vectors in each unit time.