Earlier this morning, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published an Apple invention which replaces the frames that are dropped during a low-bandwidth FaceTime call, relying on pre-recorded as well as doctored images to get the job done. This is a transparent process which to the end user, it would seem as though the entire video feed is seamless. Pretty nifty work, don’t you think so?
<1--more-->This particular patent application from Apple has been titled “Video transmission using content-based frame search,” and it is all set to deal with dropped frames in a FaceTime video call. This particular issue has been a bane to select iPhone or iPad users as they communicate using a low-bandwidth connection. Right now, video communication over cellular data has proven to be less than optimal in a fair number of areas, especially due to bandwidth restrictions as well as existing wireless technology.
This particular technology would also do its bit to cut back on data consumption, since coefficients can be used to dynamically reproduce a scene from an already transmitted video. Imagine inserting one artificially generated video frame for each three live frames, it would result in quite a substantial savings. It remains to be seen whether this invention would be implemented one of these days.