The present invention relates to an encoding method and an encoding apparatus capable of encoding a still picture or a video signal with high efficiency, wherein the first and second hierarchical encodings are performed on data to be encoded so as to efficiently perform encoding with a small amount of memory. A second code string is generated, and the first and second code strings generated by the hierarchical encoding step are respectively stored in one and the other of the memory areas of the storage means successively appended according to the priority given to the hierarchy. If redundancy occurs in the memory area to be stored in the process of executing storage control and storing control of the storage step, the hierarchy of code strings having the higher priority at this point is preferentially stored in the other code string. It was.;With this arrangement, the memory usage efficiency can be improved, the data transfer in the device can be speeded up, and the wavelet transform can be executed more quickly with a small amount of hardware and with simple control.
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