Patent ID: 7330596

Claim:
An image processing apparatus, comprising: a code stream storing part that stores a hierarchically encoded compressed code obtained by dividing an image into a plurality of tiles and performing discrete wavelet transform on pixel values of the image tile by tile; a decoding quantity specifying part that specifies decoding quantity of the compressed code, the decoding quantity being a portion of the compressed code which portion is to be decoded; an image decoding part that decodes the compressed code by the decoding quantity specified by said decoding quantity specifying part; and an image display part that causes a display unit to display the image based on the compressed code decoded by said image decoding part, wherein said image decoding part comprises a tile boundary smoothing part that performs smoothing of tile boundary distortion on the image after the decoding by application of a low-pass filter, the tile boundary smoothing part controlling a degree of smoothing of the low-pass filter according to a ratio of the decoding quantity to the entire quantity of the compressed code.