Image processing apparatus and method

IMAGE PROCESSING APPARATUS AND METHOD The present disclosure relates to an image processing apparatus and an image processing method that are intended to suppress a decrease in parallelism of coding and decoding. An image is divided into a plurality of Coding Tree Units (CTUs), the divided image comprising a plurality of CTU lines in parallel. Each CTU of the plurality of CTUs is divided into a plurality of quadtree blocks, wherein each block of the plurality of quadtree blocks is a processing unit having a size smaller than that of the CTU. The disclosed technique determines whether Wavefront Parallel Processing (WPP) is applied to code the plurality of CTUs, wherein the WPP has a delay of one CTU between adjacent CTU lines of the plurality of CTU lines. Upon determining that the WPP is not applied to code the plurality of CTUs, the disclosed technique performs intra prediction from an upper right quadtree block of a current CTU of a current CTU line of the plurality of CTU lines to a lower left quadtree block of a non-adjacent upper right CTU of the adjacent upper CTU line. Upon determining that the WPP is applied to code the plurality of CTUs, the disclosed technique does not perform the intra prediction of the upper right quadtree block of the current CTU to the lower left quadtree block of the non-adjacent upper right