Patent Document ID: 5583573
Application ID: 08385987
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A method of compressively encoding a segment of a digital video signal to obtain a nominal amount of encoded data, comprising the steps of: formatting the segment into a plurality of rectangular image area blocks; calculating, separately for each of the individual blocks in said segment, a dynamic range equal to a difference between maximum and minimum pixel values within each block; determining, from each calculated dynamic range, a predicted amount of encoded data that would be generated for the segment at a standard quantization level; adding each of the separately determined predicted amounts for all blocks in the segment together, to thereby form a total predicted amount of encoded data; selecting a segment quantization level that will yield an amount of encoded data substantially equal to said nominal amount of encoded data based on said total predicted amount of encoded data; executing an orthogonal transform on each block in said segment to generate coefficients; quantizing said coefficients at said segment quantization level, thereby generating quantized coefficients; encoding said quantized coefficients by a variable length encoding method, thereby generating encoded data; and storing said encoded data in a buffer memory.