Patent ID: 8798381

Claim:
A method of decoding image, the method comprising: determining coding units having a hierarchical structure for decoding an image using split information of a coding unit, determining at least one prediction unit for predicting a coding unit among the coding units using information about a partition type, and determining at least one transformation unit for inversely transforming the coding unit using information about a depth of the at least one transformation information about a depth of the at least one transformation unit are parsed from a bitstream; obtaining, from the bitstream, transformation coefficients generated by transformation according to the at least one transformation unit generated by dividing the coding unit, and reconstructing a residual of the at least one transformation unit by performing inverse quantization and inverse transformation on the parsed transformation coefficients; and performing intra prediction or inter prediction on the at least one prediction unit to generate a predictor, and reconstructing 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 without considering 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.