Abstract: Embodiments of a method and apparatus for preparing a first node of a communications system for transmitting an encoded digital signal to a second node of the communication system is described for providing Terminal QoS. The encoded digital signal is generated from a digital signal, the first node providing the encoded digital signal and the first node having access to display parameters associated with the digital signal. The second node is for at least decoding the encoded signal within an execution time and for subsequent display, the encoding and/or decoding being defined by at least one encoding-decoding scheme in accordance with coding parameters. The coding parameters are determined for encoding-decoding in accordance with one or more first display quality measures of the decoded signal after decoding, one or more execution times of the decoding of the encoded digital signal, and one or more second display quality measures.

Abstract: Embodiments of a method and apparatus for preparing a first node of a communications system for transmitting an encoded digital signal to a second node of the communication system is described for providing Terminal QoS. The encoded digital signal is generated from a digital signal, the first node providing the encoded digital signal and the first node having access to display parameters associated with the digital signal. The second node is for at least decoding the encoded signal within an execution time and for subsequent display, the encoding and/or decoding being defined by at least one encoding-decoding scheme in accordance with coding parameters. The coding parameters are determined for encoding-decoding in accordance with one or more first display quality measures of the decoded signal after decoding, one or more execution times of the decoding of the encoded digital signal, and one or more second display quality measures.

Abstract: The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for compressing digital data, such as the digital representation of a colored image. A scanning routine is described which aims to maintain the integrity of regions of the image that the human visual system also finds important. Pixel data from the image data includes color components, e.g., intensities of three or more colors such as red, green and blue or cyan, magenta and yellow. When the color components of the pixels are represented in color space, the axes of which are the three color components with the intensities thereof as variables, it has been found experimentally, particularly for artificial or synthetic images, that significant regions in the image tend to produce clusters of points in color space. In accordance with the invention, the color space is scanned by a space filling curve to convert the coordinates in color space into a one dimensional matrix such as a histogram. If certain types of space filling curves are used, e.g.