Patent ID: 7471841

Claim:
A method of processing using hardware that may include one or more processors, the processing being of a plurality of ordered series of digital signals, each signal having a value including an amplitude from a finite set of amplitudes consisting of the most likely-to-occur amplitude and at least one other amplitude, the processing to reduce the amount of data used to represent the plurality of a series of digital signals and to form codewords such that the more likely-to-occur sequences of values of digital signals in each series are represented by relatively short codewords and the less likely to occur sequences of values of digital signals in each series are represented by relatively long codewords, the method comprising: establishing a breakpoint along the ordering of the series to define a first contiguous region and a second contiguous region, such that clusters of consecutive signals of any value other than the most likely-to-occur value occur mostly in the first contiguous region, the establishing using statistics calculated from at least some of the ordered series of digital signals, the statistics being of where, along the ordering of the plurality of the series, signals of any value other than the most likely-to-occur value occur in clusters of consecutive signals of any value other than the most likely-to-occur value; and for each series in the plurality, encoding the signals in the first region using a first region encoding method; and encoding the signals in the second region using a second region encoding method, wherein the first region and second region encoding methods include variable length codes such that relatively short codewords are formed to represent sequences of values that are relatively more likely-to-occur, and relatively long codewords are formed to represent sequences of values that are relatively less likely-to-occur, and wherein in the case that the established breakpoint is such that the second region is a null region, all the quantized coefficients are encoded using the first region encoding method, and in the case that the established breakpoint is such that the first region is a null region, all the coefficients are encoded using the second region encoding method.