Samsung Patents a Way to Decode Both Color Channels in Video From a Single Data Signal
Every video you watch encodes color information in multiple separate streams, and decoding each one independently costs time and file space. Samsung's new patent describes a method for collapsing two of those color streams into one shared signal, then splitting them apart at playback with a simple weighting step.
How Samsung's joint color signal cuts video file overhead
Video files store color in a format most people never think about: instead of pure red, green, and blue values, they split color into a brightness channel and two separate color-difference channels, called Cb and Cr. Decoding those two color channels separately means doing the work twice, even when the information in them is closely related.
Samsung's patent describes a method where, under the right conditions, those two color channels share a single compressed data block instead of each having their own. When your device decodes the video, it reads that one block and applies a weight to reconstruct each channel individually. The decoder figures out the right weights based on whether the video block was predicted from surrounding frames (inter mode) or estimated from nearby pixels in the same frame (intra mode).
The practical goal is to reduce redundant data in the compressed file and give decoders less work to do, which could mean smaller video files or faster playback on devices that support this approach.
… reconstructing the residual sample of the Cr component by using the chroma joint residual sample of the current block and the weight of the residual sample of the Cr component, and reconstructing the residual sample of the Cb component by using the chroma joint residual sample of the current block and the weight of the residual sample of the Cb component.
Translation: It rebuilds both color components by applying specific weights to the shared video signal.
How the decoder splits one chroma signal into two color channels
Modern video compression standards, including the newer formats that Samsung and its industry partners develop, represent color using a system called YCbCr. The Y channel carries brightness; Cb and Cr carry color-difference information (roughly, how blue or how red a pixel is relative to neutral gray). Normally, any leftover error after prediction (the "residual") is stored and decoded separately for each channel.
This patent introduces a mode called chroma joint residual coding. When active, a single residual block in the bitstream (the compressed data file) stands in for both the Cb and Cr residuals. A coded block flag (CBF), which is a one-bit signal that says whether a block has any residual data worth transmitting, determines when the joint mode is available:
- In intra prediction (predicting a block from pixels in the same frame), joint mode is allowed if either Cb or Cr has a nonzero CBF.
- In inter prediction (predicting from a previous or future frame), joint mode requires both Cb and Cr to have nonzero CBFs.
Once the decoder identifies that joint mode is active, it selects a pair of weights from a predefined set of joint modes. One weight scales the shared residual to recover the Cr channel; the paired weight recovers the Cb channel. The weights can be positive, negative, or fractional, covering cases where the two channels are correlated in different ways.
The result is that the decoder reconstructs both color channels from one data block plus a lightweight lookup, rather than transmitting and decoding two full residual blocks.
What this means for compressed video on Samsung devices
For everyday viewers, the appeal is efficiency: video that is compressed more tightly without sacrificing quality means smaller files, faster streaming on weak connections, and less battery drain during playback on a phone or TV. Samsung makes both the chips that decode video and the consumer devices that run them, so a compression improvement that works end-to-end through their stack could show up in products like smart TVs, Galaxy phones, or streaming chips.
Samsung's steady investment in video codec patents signals that the company is trying to influence the next generation of compression standards, not just implement whatever the standards bodies finalize. Whether this specific approach makes it into a ratified standard depends on the standards process, but filing the patent stakes a technical position early.
That makes this Samsung's 113th filing we've tracked since May in our camera sensor push watchlist, following one that auto-highlights video moments and one that pairs clips with still photos.
This is a codec patent, and codec patents are about as far from a finished user feature as you can get. The gap between "we have a weighting scheme for joint residuals" and "this ships in a device" runs through standards bodies, encoder implementations, decoder chip revisions, and interoperability testing, none of which are quick.
The actual idea is tidy: two correlated color channels often carry redundant residual data, so sharing one block and scaling it is a reasonable compression trick. The patent is careful about when the joint mode fires, with different rules for intra and inter prediction, which suggests the inventors did the groundwork on edge cases.
If Samsung's approach were folded into a future video standard (the way earlier chroma prediction tools made it into HEVC or VVC), the benefit would eventually reach any device that decodes that format. That is a long road, and most codec proposals don't make it. Treat this as a technical contribution to an ongoing industry conversation, not an imminent product change.
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The drawings
24 drawing sheets from US 2026/0270402 A1 · click any drawing to enlarge
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