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

Claim 0:
1. A decoding apparatus comprising:
a stream input unit configured to obtain, from an encoder, an image stream that comprises a plurality of slices, each slice being composed of at least one encoding block line;
a control unit configured to determine 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, the stream input unit is configured to determine 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, a plurality of arithmetic decoding units and a plurality of image decoding units are configured to perform arithmetic decoding processing on the respective slice in a predetermined order of each arithmetic decoding unit, wherein a respective arithmetic decoding unit is configured to initiate 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
an amount of code that is controlled for processing the respective slice is within a predetermined upper limit code amount.