Method and apparatus for efficiently encoding and decoding image sequences

Abstract From the Canadian patent

A method and apparatus, for encoding transform coefficient data representing an error or a motion description of each of a plurality of blocks in one image frame of a timed sequence of image frames, identify those blocks for which data will be transmitted, quad-tree encode, and then variable length encode the locations of the blocks. The bit rate can be controlled by varying the quantization of the encoded data and preferably quantization step size is predicted prior to encoding the data. Further the quad-tree encoding process can be terminated after the coding process generates a selected number of bits. At the receiver, the method and apparatus provide a multiple lookup table method for …