Image processing equipment and methods

Abstract

Parallelism refers to image processing equipment and image processing methods that are permitted to prevent the reduction of parallelism in the creation and decrement of images. The system data related to images is generated in parallel within each path of the encoding tree units, each encoding tree unit comprising boundary blocks and corresponding to the top encoding block in the tree structure, and the encoding of each path is performed in such a way that it is delayed by an amount corresponding to one encoding tree unit for the encoding of the path immediately above the encoded path. Furthermore, the encoded data is acquired by encoding the image-related data coefficients, which are decoded in parallel within each path of the encoding tree units. Each encoding tree unit consists of boundary blocks corresponding to the top encoding block in the tree structure, and the decoding of each path is performed in such a way that it is delayed by an amount corresponding to one encoding tree unit relative to the decoding of the path immediately above the decoded path. The patent may be applied to, for example, image processing equipment, image encoding equipment, image decoding equipment, or similar devices.