Patent ID: 8218886

Claim:
A tangible computer storage medium of a storage device containing instructions effective, when executing in a data processing system, to cause said data processing system to perform operations comprising: receiving, by a server of an interactive streaming image system, client information from one or more clients of the interactive streaming image system and which corresponds to a perceived movement of a user of one of the clients; generating, by a content generator of the server, a new image frame based on the received client information which corresponds to the movement of the user; determining, by the server, an initial compression level; comparing, by a content change detector of the server, the new image frame to a previous image frame to determine whether content changed between the new image frame and the previous image frame which corresponds to the movement of the user; performing, by a smoothing module of the server, a smoothing heuristic by generating a multi-frame smoothing routine based on the initial compression level, a target compression level, and a number of frames to achieve the target compression level; wherein performing the smoothing heuristic comprises increasing image quality in response to no change of content between the new image frame and the previous image frame, and wherein further performing the smoothing heuristic comprises decreasing image quality in response to a change in content between the new image frame and the previous image frame which corresponds to the movement of the user; setting by the smoothing module the new compression level for the image frame based on the generated multi-frame smoothing routine; encoding, by a content encoder of the server, the new image frame based on the new compression level; and transmitting, by the server, the encoded new image frame and the new compression level to the one or more clients of the interactive streaming image system.