| Global Digital Audio and Video Technology Patent Layout |
Preface
The MPEG-2 standard promoted in 1994 is a milestone standard in digital audio-visual area. It is a perfect match of mathematics and industry, and more importantly, it has adopted a successful commercial model and realized fast industrialization of MPEG-2 standard.
At present, there are two main series of audio and video coding/decoding standards, one is the MPEG series made by ISO/IEC JTC1, and the other is H.26x video coding/decoding series and G.7 audio coding/decoding series. These standards have greatly pushed forward technological advancement and industrial development, but also brought a series of problems.
One problem is when an audio/video product is designed, how to identify what patents this product has used, how much royalty you should pay, and pay to whom. No clear answer could be given. Patent has become a sword suspending over the head of enterprises. Its related question is how many patents in the world are related to audio and video coding/decoding technology. The second problem is when some enterprise thinks it has made breakthrough in a technical area, is it a real breakthrough or has already been covered by other people’s patents? You can’t find definite answer from either technical engineer or patent engineer. The third problem is if there are still patent blanks in digital audio and video area. This is an even more difficult question to answer.
Based on the above questions, it becomes necessary to establish a complete, systematic digital audio and video patent database, which could assist the innovation of China’s digital audio and video technology and accelerate its industrialization process by providing accurate patent information, thus to promote the technical innovation of Chinese enterprises especially small and medium enterprises and provide an excellent environment for the healthy development of digital audio and video industry.
2. Technology classification
To establish a digital audio and video patent database, first of all we need to understand, learn and analyze the relevant technologies. When making intellectual property analysis, the most important thing for an enterprise is to understand relevant technologies, in which dissembling a technology area into different technology points is the critical step. For audio and video coding/decoding technology, different people have different classifications, e.g. lossless and lossy, waveform and parameter, narrowband and broadband, and CBR and VBR. According to CSIP, audio coding/decoding technology could be divided into six technical modules:
Parametric coding;
Wave filter/module switch technology;
Stereo technology;
Audio entropy coding;
Audio conversion technology;
Audio quantization technology.
Video technology could also be divided into six modules:
Inter-frame prediction technology: Bidirectional predictive coding, interlaced video coding, motion vector prediction, sub-pixel interpolation, multi-reference frame prediction and variable block prediction;
Intra-frame prediction technology;
Video conversion quantization technology: Coversion, quantization, rescheduling and RZ coding;
Video entropy coding: Variable-length coding and arithmetic coding;
Loop-filter technology (filter decision and execution)p;
Bit stream structure (including but not limited to the following sub-modules): Rate control and buffer management, header, start code, frame coding, transmission and decoding, display sequence, and time reference index.
The above modules could be further divided into various sub-modules. The audio and video technology covers over 30 technology points. However, the above classification still could not cover the whole digital audio and video technology, not to mention the standards of digital audio and video area. There are still big gap between technology and standard.
3. Patent distribution
Based on the above technology classification, we summarized the distribution of global digital audio and video patents after careful patent search, reading and sorting.
Here is the distribution by country:
Video |
Audio |
Applicant |
Applications |
Applicant |
Applications |
US |
10237 |
US |
1168 |
JP |
8980 |
JP |
759 |
CN |
1186 |
CN |
198 |
EP |
1055 |
EP |
127 |
WO |
1021 |
WO |
102 |
KR |
928 |
KR |
55 |
GB |
312 |
CA |
40 |
CA |
203 |
GB |
30 |
TW |
188 |
TW |
17 |
From the above we can see US is the major patent applicant in both audio and video area with 1,168 audio patents and 10,237 video patents (by Sept. 2007).
Patent Applications of Major Countries/Regions (Video):
From the above figure we can see that US patent applications maintained stable increase from 1993 to 2001, and China applications witnessed fast increase from 2001 to 2004.
Fruitful Patent Applicants in China:
No. |
Applicant |
Applications |
1 |
Samsung Electronics (South Korea) |
124 |
2 |
Panasonic Corporation (Japan) |
82 |
3 |
Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. (Europe) |
47 |
4 |
Sony (Japan) |
35 |
5 |
Royal Philips (Europe) |
28 |
6 |
Tsinghua University (China) |
27 |
7 |
Huawei Technologies (China) |
26 |
8 |
Institute of Computer Technology, CAS (China) |
25 |
9 |
Sony Corporation (Japan) |
21 |
10 |
Toshiba corporation (Japan) |
21 |
Total |
436 |
Among fruitful patent institutions of Asia, Samsung takes the leading position, followed by Panasonic, and China has obtained many awards, too.
General Distribution of Global Digital Audio and Video Technology Patents:
The above form shows the statistics of global patent distribution. The number of patent applications from China is accurate like 49 loop-filter applications and 152 entropy coding applications. The red-marked data is the analysis result of AVS Standard Working Group in 2004. Please remind that though the technology classification methods adopted by the two institutions are different, there are four same categories for video technology, i.e. loop-filter, entropy coding, conversion quantization and intra-frame prediction, and three same categories for audio technology, i.e. stereo, entropy coding, and conversion. Another point is that since one patent may cover several technology points, “merged total” is not just the mathematic total of the numbers, e.g. 28334 is not the mathematic total of the number of patents of six technology points. After years of development, the number of patents of audio and video area increased substantially as compared to that of 2004. By Sept. 2007, the number of total global audio and video patents reached 31,141, which is still increasing day by day.
4. Global digital audio and video patent database
On the basis of studying and analyzing digital audio and video technologies, we classify them according to technology points, define key words, and conduct search. Then we analyze the found data and classify and mark the over 30,000 pieces of patent data according to main applicant, main inventor, technology type, technology module, search condition, country, IPC class, and IPC subclass.
Here is a picture of the database searched with “technology module”:
From the picture we can see that we can search according to technology module. For example, intra-frame prediction technology has 11,187 patents, in which the 13th patent involve both intra-frame prediction technology and entropy coding technology.
Here is a picture of the database searched with “main applicant”:
下图是按照主申请人进行检索的数据库界面：
If we make search with “main applicant”, we can easily find out all digital audio and video patents applied by a company. There are several hundred main applicants in the world for digital audio and video area.
To make things clear, the establishment of digital audio and video patent database could not solve all problems but some basic problems. For example, when conducting R&D, enterprise can easily find the information of the target patents like who has applied for patent on this technology, what is the patent layout, and what area is left for new patent application.
Digital audio and video database is just a basic patent database. It could not cover all digital audio and video patents in the world or solve all the problems encountered by enterprises. However, enterprises can base their researches on this database to substantially reduce repetitive fundamental work.
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