ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 16 -- United States Patent no. RE50,496, issued on July 15, was assigned to QUALCOMM Inc. (San Diego).

"Multi-metric filtering" was invented by In Suk Chong (San Diego) and Marta Karczewicz (San Diego).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A filter unit of a video encoder or video decoder can determine a first metric for a group of pixels within a block of pixels, determine a second metric for the group of pixels, determine a filter based on the first metric and the second metric, and generate a filtered image by applying the filter to the group of pixels. The first metric and second metric can be an activity metric and a direction metric, respectively, or can be other metrics s...