Patent ID: 8295355

Claim:
A method of decoding an image, the method comprising: obtaining prediction mode information of a current block from a bitstream; determining a block co-located with the current block from among a first block co-located with the current block in a temporally preceding picture and a second block co-located with the current block in a temporally following picture for obtaining motion vector predictor candidates of the current block based on the obtained prediction mode information; obtaining the motion vector predictor candidates of the current block using the determined block co-located with the current block; obtaining a motion vector predictor of the current block among the obtained motion vector predictor candidates based on the obtained prediction mode information; and obtaining a motion vector of the current block based on the obtained motion vector predictor and a differential vector obtained from the bitstream, wherein the image is hierarchically split from a plurality of maximum coding units according to the information about a maximum size of a coding unit into coding units of coded depths according to depths; a coding unit of a current depth is one of rectangular data units split from a coding unit of a upper depth; the coding unit of a current depth are split into coding units of a lower depth, independently from neighboring coding units; and the coding units of a hierarchical structure comprise encoded coding units among the coding units split from a maximum coding unit.