Patent ID: 8842927

Claim:
An apparatus for encoding an image, the apparatus comprising: a predictor that performs inter prediction on a plurality of coding units of the image and determines at least one prediction unit in the coding unit to generate residuals; a transformer that performs transformation and quantization on the residuals of the coding unit and determines at least one transformation unit in the coding unit, to generate quantized transformation coefficients of the at least one transformation unit; and an entropy encoder that entropy-encodes the quantized frequency component coefficients, wherein, when the prediction mode is determined to be an inter prediction mode, not an intra prediction mode, the transformer determines the at least one transformation unit in the coding unit regardless of 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, one or more prediction units are obtained from the coding unit of the lower depth.