Patent ID: 8792737

Claim:
An apparatus for decoding image, the 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 information about a depth of the at least one transformation unit, wherein the split information of a coding unit, the information about a partition type and the information about a depth of the at least one transformation unit are parsed from a bitstream; a decoder which reconstructs a residual of the at least one transformation unit by performing inverse quantization and inverse transformation on transformation coefficients, performs intra prediction or inter prediction on the at least one 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 individually from a size of the at least one prediction unit in the coding unit, the image is split into a plurality of maximum coding units, according to information about a maximum size of the coding unit, the maximum coding unit is hierarchically split into one or more coding units of depth including at least one of a current depth and a lower depth, according to split information, when the split information indicates a split for the current depth, the coding unit of the current depth is split into four rectangular coding units of a lower depth, independently from neighboring coding units, and when the split information indicates a non-split of the lower depth, the at least one prediction unit is obtained from the coding unit of the lower depth.