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

Claim 4:
5. An encoding apparatus comprising:
an image division unit configured to (i) obtain an input image and (ii) divide the input image into a first image and a second image;
a first encoder configured to (i) receive the first image and (ii) generate a first plurality of slices of the first image;
a second encoder configured to (i) receive the second image and (ii) generate a second plurality of slices of the second image;
a control unit configured to control an image encoding unit and an arithmetic encoding unit in the first encoder and the second encoder so as to satisfy at least a first condition and a second condition,
wherein the first condition comprises a difference between a total number of encoding block lines included in any N consecutive slices and a total number of encoding block lines included in N consecutive slices different from the any N consecutive slices is 1 or less,
wherein the second condition comprises a code amount of each slice is less than a predetermined upper limit code amount; and
a stream coupling unit configured to (i) generate a stream by combining the first plurality of slices and the second plurality of slices, (ii) to add a delay reduction flag indicating that at least the first condition and the second condition are satisfied in the generated stream, and (iii) output the generated stream to an encoder, wherein a decoding start time is 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.