Patent ID: 6999515

Claim:
A method of encoding an input signal according to a graceful degradation principle to obtain an information stream, said information stream being organized as a sequence of blocks and poses temporal non-uniform data processing requirements, wherein the method comprises the steps of: determining one or more control parameters and a block-associated processing load; and adjusting by a quantifier one or more of said parameters to one or more later blocks before processing thereof, under control of an actual processing load pertaining to one or more previous blocks; wherein said actual processing load is used to predict a future processing load by retrocoupling a calculation of the actual processing load to the quantifier, and said adujusting step avoids overload-inflicted losses of information in the future processing load, which method further comprises the steps of: checking whether a particular picture can be restored; and in a negative case undertaking to find an averaged picture between an immediately preceding picture and a next-following picture.