IMAGE DECODING TECHNIQUE FOR SUPPRESSING TILE BOUNDARY DISTORTION

An image decoding device for decoding a hierarchically encoded compressed code obtained by dividing an image into a plurality of tiles and performing discrete wavelet transform on the pixel values of the image tile by tile includes a tile boundary smoothing part that performs smoothing of tile boundary distortion on the image after the decoding by application of a low-pass filter. The tile boundary smoothing part controls the degree of smoothing of the low-pass filter according to the ratio of the decoding quantity to the entire quantity of the compressed code. The decoding quantity is the portion of the compressed code which portion is to be decoded.