Patent ID: 8891618

Claim:
A method of decoding video data, the method comprising: splitting an image into one or more coding units of depths; determining one or more transformation units in a current coding unit; obtaining, from a received bitstream, a quantization mode indicating which depth of coding unit contains a quantization parameter delta; determining the depth of coding unit containing the quantization parameter delta based on the quantization mode; when a depth of the current coding unit corresponds to the determined depth of coding unit, obtaining the quantization parameter delta for the current coding unit from the bitstream and determining a quantization parameter of the one or more transformation units using the quantization parameter delta; and, performing inverse-quantization and inverse transformation on the one or more transformation units using the quantization parameter, wherein: the image is split into a plurality of maximum coding units, a maximum coding unit, among the plurality of maximum coding units, is hierarchically split into the one or more coding units of depths including at least one of a current depth and a lower depth according to the split information, when the split information indicates a split for the current depth, the coding unit of a current depth is split into four coding units of the lower depth, independently from neighboring coding units, and when the split information indicates a non-split for the current depth, the transformation units are obtained from the coding unit of the current depth.