Dave - The IP that I have seen relates to Quantization, Adaptive Codebooks, Variable Rate Coders, Voiced/Unvoiced Detection, which are all methods of coding a signal.
Agreed, they have patents in all of those areas, but from a cursory look they all appear to be tailored to vocoders. I'd be willing to gamble that they are only peripheral to video compression. But, in addition to the vocoder compression patents they also have at least four patents for video compression that do not, as their main feature, use codebooks. Instead they use they same types of techniques as used in JPEG and MPEG compression (i.e. dividing the picture up into blocks, performing discrete cosine transforms, throwing out the information with the least effect on a human observer and making a data stream. Very different from codebooks.) The patent numbers of the ones I've seen are 05576767, 05452109, 05107345, 05021891.
Clark
PS I am familiar with MPEG compression but I really haven't seen any Qualcomm IP that uses MPEG compression. Just a clarification - I didn't say that they used MPEG compression, only that they used many of the same techniques as MPEG.
PS Just an interesting note - they also have a patent on a FAX transmission algorithm. |
