Patent ID: 8515193

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for building an exemplar dictionary comprising exemplars for encoding images, the method comprising: identifying a set of exemplars, each exemplar comprising at least one image; performing hierarchical clustering of the set of exemplars to generate a plurality of clusters arranged as a hierarchy, the hierarchy comprising a high level and a low level, such that clusters at the high level are closer to a root of the hierarchy compared to clusters at the low level, the hierarchical clustering comprising: generating clusters at each level of the hierarchy, the generating comprising filtering exemplars such that the filtering performed at the high level generates less information per exemplar compared to the filtering performed at the low level, the filtering comprising performing principal component analysis to select dimensions for feature vectors representing the exemplars to generate a set of reduced dimension exemplars; and storing an exemplar dictionary comprising information describing the hierarchy of clusters, wherein the exemplar dictionary is used to identify predictor blocks for encoding an image.