Progressive interleaved delivery of interactive descriptions and renderers for electronic publishing of merchandise

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF AN EMBODIMENT OF THE INVENTION Referring now to FIG.
1.
a three-dimensional object 100 mounted on a turntable 102 is spun before a camera 104 producing images 106.
The images 106 are scanned by an automatic sequence editor 108 which receives input from an editor to eliminate duplicated images (for instance, elimination of any frame of the rotated object containing a view of the object which is more than is viewed in a 360.
degree.
spin of the object).
The objects 100 are generally photographed against a plain background however as a result of variations in lighting or other abnormalities in the picturing process, there may be variations in color and intensity of the background.
Those can be eliminated by a background identifier 110 and eliminator 111.
The background identifier 100 scans the image looking for variations in color and intensity to identify the background portion of the image.
The background eliminator 112 eliminates the identified background if either variation in color or intensity exceeds a certain preset level.
Images from the background eliminator 111 are sent simultaneously to an automatic sequence analyzer 112 and an image and a multi-layer video encoding circuit 114.
The automatic sequence analyzer 112 scans the object and generates frame hints to the image and multi-layer video encoding 114.
Frame hints consist indicating which frames 109 contain changes in color and/or contour of the object 100.
Frame hints are stored in separately accessible storage segment 116.
Key frame hints from the automatic sequence analyzer are also used by the image and multilayer video encoding circuitry 114 to take the frames 109 provided by the background eliminator 111 and produce a number of views of the object stored in a separately accessible segments of storage 118 to 126.
One of the views is a still frame of the object 100 stored in segment 118.
Another view is an animated representation of the object 100 as it rotates.
This view is stored in separately accessible segment 120