ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 10 -- United States Patent no. 12,294,727, issued on May 6, was assigned to GE Video Compression LLC (Niskayuna, N.Y.).

"Layer characteristic signaling in multi-layered coding" was invented by Karsten Suehring (Berlin), Thomas Schierl (Berlin), Detlev Marpe (Berlin), Robert Skupin (Berlin), Yago Sanchez De La Fuente (Berlin) and Gerhard Tech (Berlin).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A signaling of at least one characteristic for layers of a multi-layered video signal such as, for example, for each layer the indication of dependent layers to which the respective layer directly relates via inter-layer prediction, or the signaling of the afore-mentioned second inter-dependency...