ALEXANDRIA, Va., Sept. 10 -- United States Patent no. 12,413,634, issued on Sept. 9, was assigned to PANASONIC INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY CORPORATION OF AMERICA (Torrance, Calif.).

"Encoder, decoder, encoding method, and decoding method" was invented by Kiyofumi Abe (Osaka, Japan), Takahiro Nishi (Nara, Japan), Tadamasa Toma (Osaka, Japan) and Yusuke Kato (Osaka, Japan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An encoder includes memory and circuitry which: (i) encodes an image block; (ii) when encoding the image block: binarizes coefficient information indicating coefficients of the image block; and controls whether to apply arithmetic encoding to a binary data string obtained by binarizing the coefficient ...