Patent ID: 7397851

Claim:
A method for compressing a stream of original video frames comprising the steps of: a) selecting a current frame from said stream of original video frame, b) distinguishing between regions of the current frame, wherein at least one of said regions is nonrectangular, c) separating said current frame into a plurality of image planes, wherein at least one plane contains all of the pixels from said at least one nonrectangular region, and wherein at least one other plane contains none of the pixels from said at least one nonrectangular region, d) selecting one of a plurality of distinct compression methods for each of said image planes, wherein the distinct compression method is selected based on the characteristics of the corresponding image plane, e) compressing each of said image planes into encoded data using the corresponding distinct compression method, f) selecting the next frame from said stream as the current frame, and g) repeating steps b) through f) while frames are remaining in the stream, whereby the overall compressed size for said stream, namely the combined size of the encoded data for each image plane, is less than the compressed size when each frame of said stream is compressed with a single compression method selected based on the characteristics of the entire stream.