Patent ID: 8649620

Claim:
An image decoding method, comprising: decoding a coded signal to generate quantization coefficients and pieces of management information, the quantization coefficients each corresponding to a corresponding one of transform units, and the pieces of the management information indicating a structure of the transform units; performing inverse quantization and inverse transform on each of the quantization coefficients, eventually generating prediction error signals of the respective transform units; and adding at least one of the prediction error signals to a prediction signal for each of coding units each including the transform units, eventually generating decoded signals for each of the coding units, wherein the quantization coefficients and the pieces of the management information have a tree structure, each of the transform units corresponds to a corresponding one of leaf nodes in the tree structure, and the decoding includes decoding, for each of the leaf nodes, a coded piece of the management information and a coded quantization coefficient which are arranged in succession in the coded signal for the each of the leaf nodes.