Patent ID: 8238679

Claim:
A method of processing a video signal, said video signal consisting of a stream of pixel bytes representing the pixels of successive video frames, each of said video frames corresponding to a two-dimensional array of pixel bytes, said method comprising: converting said stream of pixel bytes into a stream of difference bytes by performing a subtraction between each pixel byte and a preceding pixel byte in said stream; discarding any carry bit produced by said subtraction; grouping together in a single group the difference bytes corresponding to a current one of said video frames; ranking the difference bytes occurring in said group in accordance with the population of the difference bytes of the same value in said group, and generating a code table for the current video frame correlating each of said difference bytes with one of a set of minimum length characters, wherein higher ranking difference bytes are assigned to shorter length characters; replacing each difference byte with the corresponding character in accordance with said code table, so as to produce a stream of minimum length characters, said stream comprising a compressed version of said video signal.