US 5,610,653 · Granted 1997-03-11

The 1997 Patent That Invented Auto-Tracking Video Zoom

Imagine recording a soccer game and wanting the camera to automatically follow the ball as it moves around the field—this patent does exactly that. You pick a target on screen, draw a box around where you want to focus, and the system keeps that target centered in your chosen window as it bounces around the video.

Curated and verified by the IsItPatented Editorial team

The plain-English version

What it protects

The claim covers a method for automatically keeping a selected target centered within a defined rectangular window as the target moves through a live or recorded video. What's protected here is the process of: picking a target, defining a viewing window, using image identification to track where that target goes, and automatically repositioning the window to keep the target in frame—then transmitting that cropped, tracked video feed.

Why it matters

This patent laid foundational technology for what became standard in modern video—auto-tracking cameras, sports broadcasts with intelligent zoom, and surveillance systems that keep moving subjects in frame. Before this, if your subject moved, you had to manually pan and zoom. This automated that entirely, which became valuable as video content and live streaming exploded in the late 1990s and beyond.

Real-world use

When you watch a professional sports broadcast and the camera seems to magically follow a player across the field without a cameraman manually controlling it, you're watching technology descended from this patent's core idea.

Original USPTO abstract

A video method and system for automatically tracking a viewer defined target within a viewer defined window of a video image as the target moves within the video image by selecting a target within a video, producing an identification of the selected target, defining a window within the video, utilizing the identification to automatically maintain the selected target within the window of the video as the selected target shifts within the video, and transmitting the window of the video.

Patent details

Publication number: US 5,610,653
Filing date: 1995-04-24
Grant date: 1997-03-11
Assignee: Abecassis; Max
Inventor(s): ABECASSIS; MAX
CPC class: G11B19/02

View original record on Google Patents →

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