Multiple camera video system which displays selected images

#This application includes a compact disk appendix containing the following files ASCII text files: 1 a) iMoveRendererPlayer_dll size 5737 KB created May 10, 2001 b) PanFileFormat_dll size 1618 KB created May 10, 2001 c) Copyright size 1 KB created May 10, 2001

#The material on the compact disk submitted with this application is hereby incorporated herein by reference.

#The present invention relates to transmitting video information and more particularly to systems for streaming and displaying video images.

#FIG. 1 is an overall high level diagram of a first embodiment of the invention.

#FIG. 2 illustrates the view on a user's display screen.

#FIG. 3 is a block diagram of a first embodiment of the invention.

#An overall diagram of a first relatively simplified embodiment of the invention is shown in FIG. 1. In the first embodiment of the invention, an event 100 is viewed and recorded by the four cameras 102A to 102D. The event 100 may for example be a baseball game. The images from cameras 102A to 102D is captured and edited by system 110. System 110 creates two streams of video data. One stream is the images captured by “one” selected camera. The second stream consists of “thumbnails” (i.e. small low resolution images) of the images captured by each of the four cameras 102A to 102D.

#The two video streams are sent to a user terminal and display 111. The images visible to the user are illustrated in FIG. 2. A major portion of the display is taken by the images from one particular camera. This is termed the focus stream. On the side of the display are four thumbnail images, one of which is associated with each of the camera 102A to 102D. It is noted that the focus stream requires a substantial amount of bandwidth. The four thumbnail images have a lower resolution and all four thumbnail images can be transmitted as a single data stream. Examples of the bandwidth used by various data streams are given below.

#FIG. 3 illustrates a the components in a system used to practice the invention and it shows how the user interacts with the system. Camera system 300 (which includes camera 102A to 102B) provides images to unit 301 which edits the image streams and which creates the thumbnail image stream. The amount of editing depends on the application and it will be discussed in detail later. FIG. 3A illustrates how the thumbnail data stream is created. The data stream from each camera and the thumbnail data stream are provided to stream control 302.