Patent ID: 7668385

Claim:
A method executed by a computer system for processing minimum coded units (MCUs) in a Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) bit stream representing an image to transform the image, comprising: generating a data structure storing MCU block numbers of the MCUs, MCU block coordinates of the MCUs in the image, and MCU block editing lists of the MCUs; receiving one or more editing operations to be applied to one or more of the MCUs; subsequent to said receiving, saving the editing operations to one or more of the MCU block editing lists of the MCUs affected by the editing operations; and subsequent to said saving, generating a new JPEG bit stream, comprising: retrieving the MCUs from the JPEG bit stream; and for each retrieved MCU, decoding the retrieved MCU, processing the retrieved MCU according to any editing operations in a corresponding MCU block editing list, encoding the retrieved MCU, and saving the retrieved MCU in the new JPEG bit stream.