Patent ID: 7372905

Claim:
A filtering strength determination method for determining a filtering strength of a filter which removes coding distortion between blocks which constitute a picture, said method comprising: a reference picture number judgment step of judging whether or not the number of reference pictures referred to by a current block and the number of reference pictures referred to by a neighboring block which is adjacent to the current block are the same, when the current block and the neighboring block are blocks which constitute a B picture; and a filtering strength determination step of determining a predetermined filtering strength from among a plurality of filtering strengths including at least one filter strength corresponding to not performing filtering, wherein in said filtering strength determination step, when it is judged that the number of reference pictures is not the same between the current block and the neighboring block in said reference picture number judgment step, the filtering strength is determined to be equal to or stronger than the filtering strength to be selected when it is judged that the number of reference pictures is the same between the current block and the neighboring block in said reference picture number judgment step.