Patent ID: 8842921

Claim:
An image decoding apparatus comprising: a determiner which determines coding units having a hierarchical structure for decoding an image using split information of a coding unit, determines at least one prediction unit for predicting a coding unit among the coding units using information about a partition type, and determines at least one transformation unit for inversely transforming the coding unit using split information of the at least one transformation unit, wherein the split information of a coding unit, the information about a partition type and the split information of the at least one transformation unit are parsed from a bitstream; and a decoder which parses from the bitstream transformation coefficients generated by transformation according to the at least one transformation unit generated by dividing the coding unit, reconstructs residual of the at least one transformation unit by performing inverse quantization and inverse transformation on the parsed transformation coefficients, and performs intra prediction or inter prediction on the prediction unit to generate a predictor, and reconstructs the image based on the residual and the predictor, wherein the coding units are split hierarchically according to a depth of the coding unit, and wherein a size of the at least one transformation unit in the coding unit is determined independently from a size of the least one prediction unit in the coding unit.