Patent ID: 7602974

Claim:
A digital image processing system, comprising: an Image Signal Processing unit adapted to process image data of a digital image, where said image data is partitioned into regions when said image data is transferred by slices into at least one fixed-size line buffer of said Image Signal Processing unit, wherein said at least one fixed-size line buffer has a line size that is shorter than a corresponding line size of said digital image, and wherein each of said slices represents a fixed number of pixels of said image data; a first storage unit adapted to store raw image data for processing by said Image Signal Processing unit; an encoding component suitable for data encoding and variable length encoding of said image data stored in said first storage unit, said encoding component being adapted to insert restart markers into said image data during processing of said slices to allow stitching together of said slices having said encoded image data, wherein said restart markers identify the end of each of said slices, point to the next in-sequence of said slices, contain padding bits to ensure that each of said slices ends on a byte boundary, and are inserted into the image data bitstream at every fixed-number minimum coding unit interval, and wherein the number of minimum coding units in each of said slices is determined by the ratio of a pixel width of said slices to a minimum coding unit width; a second storage unit adapted to store said encoded image data in segments of said second storage unit; and a downstream processing unit adapted to stitch together said encoded image data into a complete image, by using said restart markers.