Patent ID: 7082162

Claim:
An encoding system, wherein an encoder encodes uncompressed video data to form compressed video data and a decoder decodes the compressed video data to form at least an approximation of the uncompressed video data, and wherein the video data comprises a plurality of image frames comprising key frames and nonkey frames, wherein a nonkey frame is a frame that is encoded with reference to segmentation of other, reference frames, wherein the segmentation of a reference frame is an assignment of some or all of the pixels of the reference frame to segments based on at least one of pixel color values of the pixels and location of the pixels in the reference frame, the encoding system comprising: an encoder comprising: a) a segmenter that generates a segmentation of a reference frame; b) a motion matcher that matches a segment of the reference frame to an area of a current frame being encoded when the current frame is a nonkey frame; c) a metadata associator that creates a metadata element associated with the segment of the reference frame and further associated with the matched area of the current frame; and d) compressed video data outputter that outputs compressed video data including at least compressed key frames, the kinetic information and the metadata element; and a decoder comprising logic to process the compressed video data and output regenerated video data and the metadata element for the frames output.