Patent ID: 11909954
Assignee: NIPPON TELEGRAPH AND TELEPHONE CORPORATION
Field: Audio-visual technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC H | IPC H

Claim 5:
6. A decoding method for performing decoding processing in parallel, the method comprising:
obtaining, from an encoder, an image stream that comprises a plurality of slices, each slice being composed of at least one encoding block line;
determining a presence or an absence of a delay reduction flag in the obtained image stream;
based on determining the presence of the delay reduction flag, determining a decoding start time of each slice of the plurality of slices, the decoding start time determined using (i) a frame rate of the image stream, (ii) a number of encoding block lines per image in the image stream, and (iii) a decoding time of each image in the image stream;
in response to determining the decoding start time for a respective slice has been reached, performing, using a plurality of arithmetic decoding units and a plurality of image decoding units, arithmetic decoding processing on the respective slice in a predetermined order of each arithmetic decoding unit, wherein the arithmetic decoding process initiates decoding of a respective slice at time intervals corresponding to slice sizes on the image stream that satisfy conditions of:
a difference between (i) a total number of encoding block lines included in N consecutive slices and (ii) a total number of encoding block lines included in another set of N consecutive slices is 1 or less, and
(ii) an amount of code that is controlled for processing the respective slice is within a predetermined upper limit code amount.