ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 6 -- United States Patent no. 12,284,353, issued on April 22, was assigned to SUN PATENT TRUST (New York).

"Arithmetic coding for information related to sample adaptive offset processing" was invented by Toru Matsunobu (Osaka, Japan), Takahiro Nishi (Nara, Japan), Youji Shibahara (Osaka, Japan), Hisao Sasai (Osaka, Japan), Kyoko Tanikawa (Osaka, Japan), Toshiyasu Sugio (Osaka, Japan) and Kengo Terada (Osaka, Japan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An image coding method includes: performing context arithmetic coding to consecutively code (i) first information indicating whether or not to perform sample adaptive offset (SAO) processing for a first region of an image and (ii)...