Foveated compression of display streams

A method comprising:

• accessing first pixels from a first buffer of an electronic device, wherein values of the first pixels represent a high-acuity region in an image;
• accessing second pixels from a second buffer of the electronic device, wherein values of the second pixels represent a low-acuity region in the image;
• reorganizing the first pixels based on at least one dimension of the low-acuity region;
• multiplexing the reorganized first pixels and the second pixels to form a display stream;
• and
• compressing the display stream for transmission to a display, wherein compressing the display stream comprises compressing slices of the display stream on a line-by-line basis, wherein each slice of the display stream includes a number of lines that is an integer fraction of a total number of the modified first pixel lines.

An apparatus comprising:

• a processing unit configured to render first pixels representative of a high-acuity region in an image and second pixels representative of a low-acuity region in the image;
• a first buffer configured to store values of the first pixels rendered by the processing unit, wherein the first pixels are organized as a set of first pixel lines in the first buffer;
• a second buffer configured to store values of the second pixels rendered by the processing unit, wherein the second pixels are organized as a set of second pixel lines in the second buffer;
• a shaper configured to reorganize the first pixels based on at least one dimension of the low-acuity region, wherein the shaper is configured to access the values of the first pixels from the first buffer and to access the values of the second pixels from the second buffer and configured to reorganized the first pixels by concatenating subsets of the set of first pixel lines to form modified first pixel lines including a number of first pixels that is equal to a number of second pixels in the second pixel lines;
• a multiplexer configured to multiplex the reorganized first pixels and the second pixels to form a display stream;
• and
• an encoder configured to compress the display stream for transmission to a display.

An apparatus comprising:

• a processing unit configured to render first pixels representative of a high-acuity region in an image and second pixels representative of a low-acuity region in the image;
• a shaper configured to reorganize the first pixels based on at least one dimension of the low-acuity region;
• a multiplexer configured to multiplex the reorganized first pixels and the second pixels to form a display stream;
• and
• an encoder configured to compress the display stream for transmission to a display, wherein the encoder is configured to compress slices of the display stream on a line-by-line basis, wherein each slice of the display stream includes a number of lines that is an integer fraction of a total number of the modified first pixel lines.

An apparatus comprising:

• a decoder configured to decompress a display stream formed of first pixels having values representative of a high-acuity region in an image and second pixels having values representative of a low-acuity region in the image, wherein the first pixels are reorganized from an array having a first dimension to an array having a corresponding second dimension different than the first dimension prior to being compressed based on at least one dimension of the low-acuity region;
• a demultiplexer configured to demultiplex the first pixels and the second pixels;
• and
• a processing unit configured to blend the first pixels and the second pixels to form blended pixel values representative of the image, wherein the processing unit is configured to reconstruct the first pixels from the array having the second dimension into the array having the first dimension.