Patent ID: 8649615

Claim:
A moving picture compression coding apparatus comprising: a region segmentation circuit that horizontally divides a screen constituting moving picture data into a plurality of regions; a plurality of encoding circuits that encode the moving picture data for each of the regions to form encoded data elements, the number of the encoding circuits being smaller than the number of the regions in the screen divided by the region segmentation circuit; an encoded-data combining circuit that combines the encoded data elements; and a coding control circuit that controls the plurality of encoding circuits to encode the moving picture data for a plurality of regions in the screen in parallel and controls the plurality of encoding circuits so that a first encoding circuit consecutively encodes two regions which are adjacently located one above the other and each of which is neither an uppermost region nor a lowermost region, wherein the first encoding circuit does not encode the uppermost region and the lowermost region, and wherein, within a frame period, the first encoding circuit encodes the lower region of the two adjacent regions after encoding of the upper region of the two adjacent regions is finished.