Patent ID: 7577300

Claim:
An image encoding apparatus comprising: first processing means for determining whether or not each bit in a bit plane of a code block should be processed in a first pass, said first processing means generates a significance propagation pass context associated with said first pass for a bit which is determined to be processed in said first pass, said first processing means generates and delivers said significance propagation pass context required for encoding and a bit to be compressed, and simultaneously determines a magnitude refinement pass; second processing means for determining whether or not each bit in a bit plane of a code block should be processed in a second pass which is other than said first pass, said second processing means uses a result of the processing performed by said first processing means, and generates a magnitude refinement pass context associated with said second pass for a bit which is determined to be processed in said second pass, said second processing means generates and delivers said magnitude refinement pass context required for encoding and a bit to be compressed with respect to a wavelet coefficient subjected to said magnitude refinement pass; and storage means, wherein said first processing means reads and writes a significant state of each bit from and into said storage means, and manipulates a flag which indicates whether or not each bit should be processed in said first pass, and wherein said first processing means and said second processing means operate in parallel for the same bit plane of the same code block.