VIDEO ENCODING METHOD FOR TELEVISION APPLICATIONS

Continuously monitoring successive frames of a video signal and deciding, based on the similarity between the frames, whether to encode one of them with low or high information content, i.e., as a "low-resolution" frame or a "high-resolution" frame, and whether to encode the next transmitted frame as a low- resolution frame or as a high-resolution frame, and, when sending a high-resolution frame, determining whether to transmit an indication to re-display the past frame or to transmit an indication to display the high-resolution frame as a representation of the present frame. The compression method provides efficient compression of a video signal. A single future frame embodiment allows up to a doubling of the number of pixels transmitted through a channel. With multiple frame systems, even higher compression ratios are possible. Further improvements in compression ratios may be obtained by compressing the individual frames.