ALEXANDRIA, Va., Jan. 20 -- United States Patent no. 12,531,574, issued on Jan. 20, was assigned to Imagination Technologies Ltd. (Kings Langley, Great Britain).
"Guaranteed data compression" was invented by Simon Fenney (St Albans, Great Britain) and Linling Zhang (Watford, Great Britain).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Lossy methods and hardware for compressing data and the corresponding decompression methods and hardware are described. The lossy compression method comprises dividing a block of pixels into a number of sub-blocks and then analysing, for each sub-block, and selecting one of a candidate set of lossy compression modes. The analysis may, for example, be based on the alpha values f...