Patent ID: 8705609

Claim:
A moving image coding apparatus for coding an input image frame, comprising: a segment-unit-coding module for receiving the input image frame as a segment-unit image by dividing the input image frame into N number of segments, estimating an integer pel motion, and generating an image therefrom, coded by a macroblock-unit-coding module, as a 1/n pixel image; and a macroblock-unit-coding module for receiving the segment-unit image, having the estimated integer pel motion, from the segment-unit-coding module, in units of macroblocks and coding each of the macroblocks through 1/n pixel motion estimation for each macroblock, wherein the segment-unit-coding module estimates an integer pixel motion for a next segment in advance before the macroblock-unit-coding module codes the image of the macroblock units having the estimated integer pixel motion, and wherein while the operation of the macroblock-unit-coding module for coding the image of the macroblock units having the estimated integer pixel motion proceeds the operation of the segment-unit-coding module for estimating an integer pixel motion for a next segment and for generating a 1/n pixel image for a previous segment image occurs independently and simultaneously and with both operations performed in parallel, and wherein the operations of the segment-unit-coding module and the macroblock-unit-coding module are performed on different segments of the image frame in parallel.