Method and apparatus of Bayer pattern direct video compression

Abstract

Applying a mechanism of image signal processing and color-space-conversion to convert the captured Green components to be Y, luminance components for only those pixels having raw Green data without interpolation, and to convert the Blue components to be U, chrominance components for only those pixels having raw Blue data, and Red components to be V, chrominance components for only those pixels having raw Red data. These converted YUV components are input to a predetermined video compression codec for reducing the intra- and inter-frame redundant information.

What is claimed is: 
     
         1 . A method of the video capturing and compression, comprising:
 applying an image sensor to capture three colors, Red, Green and Blue with one color captured by one sensor cell;   digitizing the captured light and color signals in the image sensor cells;   applying an image compression algorithm to reduce the data amount of the digitized raw image and transferring the compressed raw image out of the image sensor device and saved into the a temporary buffer;   applying a mechanism of image signal processing method and a color-space-conversion to convert the raw image data of the searching range pixels to YUV format; and   applying a predetermined video compression algorithm to compress the Y, U and V components which are generated from above image signal processing and color-space-conversion methods.   
     
     
         2 . The method of  claim 1 , wherein the image sensor is comprised of semiconductor diode array with color filter masks on top of each cell forming mosaic pattern which color interlacing form is predetermined. 
     
     
         3 . The method of  claim 1 , wherein if no B-type coding is selected between P-type or I-type frames, then, only one previous frame of pixels is stored as the referencing frame for the motion estimation, and the targeted current frame is the frame captured in the image sensor. 
     
     
         4 . The method of  claim 1 , wherein in providing the 4:2:2 format of YUV components input to a specific video compression, there is no Y components generated from interpolation means, while in the 4:2:0 format of the YUV components input to a specific video compression, there are Y components generated from interpolation means. 
     
     
         5 . The method of  claim 1 , wherein in providing the 4:4:4 format of YUV components input to a specific video compression, there are Y, U and V components generated from interpolation means. 
     
     
         6 . The method of  claim 1 , wherein the selected video compression reduces the redundant information of intra-frame and inter-frame images with the later adopting a video compensation means. 
     
     
         7 . An apparatus of video capturing and video compression achieving low power consumption, comprising:
 an image sensor capturing the light and digitizing the pixel data and a device executes the image signal processing;   a first compression unite reducing the YUV components and saves into the temporary image buffer;   a first decompression unite recovering the corresponding region of pixels of compressed YUV components; and   a video compression device adopting the image of Y, U and V components and reducing the intra and inter frame redundancy and the data rate.   
     
     
         8 . The apparatus of  claim 7 , wherein the raw pixel data or image pixels which has gone through the image processing can be input to a predetermined compression engine, if the input are raw pixels, the first compression device is applied to reduce the data rate, while, if the input are pixels gone through image signal processing, the second compression engine is applied to reduce the pixel data rate. 
     
     
         9 . The apparatus of  claim 7 , wherein the second compression engine is a still image compression engine to compress the captured image with RGB or YUV format output from the image sensor. 
     
     
         10 . The apparatus of  claim 7 , wherein the video compression engine informs the first raw pixel decompression engine to recover the specific range of pixels for decompression and image processing before being fed to the video compression engine for motion estimation and video compression. 
     
     
         11 . The apparatus of  claim 7 , wherein the video compression engine informs the second pixel decompression engine to recover the specific range of pixels for decompression and feed to the video compression engine for motion estimation and video compression. 
     
     
         12 . The apparatus of  claim 7 , wherein the engine with block based decompression, image signal processing and a color-space conversion operates for recovering raw pixel data, color processing of each pixel and converting the RGB to YCrCb format to fit the resolution and pixel format if YCrCb format is predetermined for the still image or motion video compression.