TV picture compression and expansion

摘要

Many-to-one and one-to-many digital image transformations play a significant role in a variety of imaging communications, visualization, and robotic applications. A method is presented for forwarding mapping frames of TV images in a many-to-one mapping using run length encoding. A digital computer system includes a look-up table memory having the address of each input run-length of pixels (a series of side-by-side pixels) and the address of the single output pixel corresponding thereto. An example is a 512x512 pixel TV frame which, in real time, is mapped onto a log polar coordinate TV frame of 2000-3000 pixels. This method can be used with existing low-cost general purpose computers providing a speed advantage approximating five-hundred percent, and a memory savings of between 10 and 100,000 times, relative to the current art. As a result, electronic imaging systems employing many-to-one or one-to-many image warps may be built in significantly smaller, cheaper, faster and lower power implementations.