Invalidity dossier
US 6307550
Extracting photographic images from video
Current assignee: SOFTVIDEO Inc
Added 9/23/2026, 6:34:56 PM
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Patent summary
Title, assignee, inventors, filing/issue dates, abstract, and a plain-language overview of the claims.
Patent Overview — US 6,307,550 B1
Title: Extracting photographic images from video
Patent number / application: US 6,307,550 B1; application US09/339,475, filed 1999-06-23; granted/publication date 2001-10-23. Priority date listed as 1998-06-11, claimed from US09/096,720.
Inventors: Shenchang Eric Chen and Jonathan Worthen Brandt.
Assignee / ownership (per supplied text): originally assigned to Presenter.com, Inc.; the source also lists SoftVideo Inc and Cisco Technology Inc as current assignees, with a chain including SoftVideo, Inc., Presenter.com, Inc., WebEx Communications, Inc., Cisco WebEx LLC, and Cisco Technology, Inc.
Status: listed as "Expired – Lifetime"; anticipated expiration 2018-06-11.
Purpose. The patent addresses automatically extracting photographic still images from video. The stated field is image processing, "and more particularly … automatically extracting photographic images from a video."
Plain-language scope. Segments of video in which frame-to-frame background motion is less than a threshold are identified; the frames in each such segment are then combined to generate a photograph representative of that segment. The abstract/definitions also describe analyzing individual frames to automatically identify three shot types: still shots (multiple frames combined into a single high-resolution image), pan shots (frames stitched into a high-resolution panoramic image), and zoom shots (frames combined into a multiple-resolution still image), with pan-plus-zoom shots yielding a multiple-resolution panoramic image. Processing is automatic and unattended.
The excerpt further mentions service/business embodiments: generating still images as a service or via a video-processing kiosk; delivering images on a recording medium, printed, or over a network; and assembling images into a "video album" with optional indexing and text annotations. It also notes automatic scene-cut detection, and classifications including H04N5/4448 (frame-grabbing), G06F16/739, G06T3/4053, and H04N5/147 (scene change detection).
Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6307550/en
Not established by this excerpt: the full text of the claims, the complete written description, and the drawings/figures; the identity of cited prior-art references; and the text of dependent claims, specification passages, and omitted portions of the document.
Generated 10/1/2026, 9:42:41 PM
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Litigation summary
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PTAB challenges
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Assignment history
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Prior art
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Obviousness
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Extensions
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Derivative works
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