Patent ID: 8705621

Claim:
A method of providing for interactive remote browsing of compressed digital video signals, comprising the steps of: making available to a network, by way of a server computing system connected to the network, a scalable compressed signal representing a video sequence, the scalable compressed signal having been generated by forming a video sequence into an input signal, decomposing the input signal into a set of temporal frequency bands in a manner which exploits motion redundancy, partitioning the frequency band coefficients into blocks with defined extent in space and time, and applying scalable coding methods to the blocks of frequency band coefficients so as to generate a scalable compressed video signal with the attributes of resolution scalability, region of interest accessibility, and quality scalability of the coefficient blocks; selecting, by way of a client computing system connected to the network, a portion of the scalable compressed signal for decompression and viewing as a video sequence; providing the selected portion of the signal on the network by the server to the client; monitoring the choice of selection by the client; monitoring the status of a video cache on the client computing system so that the server computing system knows what portion of the signal the client has already received and can determine what further portion of the scalable signal is required in response to the choice of selection by the client; selecting, by way of the client, a further portion of scalable compressed signal of interest to the client; and providing the selected further portion of the signal on the network by the server to the client.