Patent Document ID: 5543845
Application ID: 08430280
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. An encoding apparatus for encoding a digital image signal, comprising: band dividing means for dividing the digital image signal into a plurality of bands; block structuring means for structuring each of the plurality of bands of the band-divided image signal into a plurality of blocks each having a plurality of pixels; orthogonal transformation means performing an orthogonal transform on each of the plurality of blocks to obtain transform coefficients; discriminating means for discriminating each of the plurality of blocks as a moving image block or a static image block; weighting means for weighting the obtained transform coefficients according to the discrimination performed by said discriminating means; and encoding means for quantizing the weighted transform coefficients in accordance with a quantization level suitable for each of the plurality of bands and for encoding the quantized and weighted transform coefficients for each of the plurality of blocks, such that said encoding is performed independently for each of the plurality of bands; wherein each of said plurality of blocks includes a plurality of values arranged in a vertical frequency direction and a horizontal frequency directions; wherein both the vertical frequency direction and the horizontal frequency direction are divided into lower and higher frequency sub-bands to produce LL, HL, LH, and HH sub-bands; and wherein for the LL sub-band, weights assigned by said weighting means increase in the vertical frequency direction, the horizontal frequency direction, and in a diagonal frequency direction, from low horizontal frequencies and low vertical frequencies to high horizontal frequencies and high vertical frequencies.