Encoding and decoding of picture signals

摘要

A picture signal encoding method in which a picture string produced by converting non-interlaced pictures into sets of field pictures each beginning from the first field of each interlaced picture and another picture string produced by converting non-interlaced pictures into sets of field pictures each beginning from the second field of each interlaced picture are combined together to an input picture signal for encoding, is disclosed. The method includes a detection step of detecting a lone field not constituting the non-interlaced picture in the input picture signal, and an encoding step of re-constructing the picture string of the input picture signal and encoding the resulting non-interlaced picture string. <IMAGE>