ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 9 -- United States Patent no. 12,289,477, issued on April 29, was assigned to Tencent America LLC (Palo Alto, Calif.).

"IBC search range" was invented by Xiaozhong Xu (State College, Pa.), Shan Liu (San Jose, Calif.) and Xiang Li (Saratoga, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method and an apparatus for video decoding are disclosed. The apparatus includes processing circuitry that decodes prediction information of a current block that is indicative of an intra block copy mode. The current block is in a current region of a plurality of regions of a current coding tree unit (CTU) in a current picture. The processing circuitry determines a block vector for the current b...