Patent ID: 8428140

Claim:
A method for encoding video having an image sequence whereby images in the image sequence are encoded in a scaled manner such that resulting encoded video contains data which ensures representation of the images in a plurality of different levels of image resolution defined by a number of pixels per image representation, the method comprising: temporarily creating a second block structure for a second resolution level, whereby the second resolution level is higher than a first resolution level, the second block structure being created in a block-based manner by a process comprising: starting from one block, the block is subdivided into partial blocks and then sub-blocks; time-predicting the second block structure to produce a predicted block structure, the second block structure being time-predicted based on at least one other image in the image sequence; determining errors in the predicted block structure; and excluding from the second block structure information not relating to the errors in the predicted block structure; comparing the second block structure with a first block structure corresponding to the first resolution level, the first and second block structures being compared to: recognize further block structure divisions included the second block structure but not the first block structure; and determine the sizes of the further block structure divisions; creating a modified second block structure by eliminating from the second block structure all further block structure divisions larger than a predefined threshold value whereby the modified second block structure constitutes a subset of the second block structure; and using the modified second block structure to encode the image in the image sequence.