Image decoding apparatus and method

An image decoding apparatus comprising:

• a front-end decoding circuit configured to:
• determine an occurrence of an error block in an N-th image frame generated according to an inter-frame coding technology in an image stream from an image encoding apparatus, wherein N is an integer larger than 1;
• and
• transmit error report information to the image encoding apparatus such that the image encoding apparatus receives the error report information at a time spot that the image decoding apparatus receives a corresponding block of an N+P−1-th image frame and encodes an N+P-th image frame in the image stream according to an intra-frame coding technology, wherein P is an integer larger than or equal to 1;
• and
• a back-end decoding circuit configured to:
• retrieve motion vector information and residue information corresponding to a plurality of first blocks in the N-th image frame before the occurrence of the error block from the image stream, so as to perform a decoding process on the first blocks according to the inter-frame coding technology to generate a first decoded result;
• set the motion vector information to be a zero vector and set the residue information to be a zero value, so as to perform the decoding process on a plurality of second blocks from the error block to a final block of the N+P−1-th image frame according to the inter-frame coding technology to generate a second decoded result;
• and
• retrieve the residue information of a plurality of intra-frame coding blocks in the N+P-th image frame from the image stream through the front-end decoding circuit to perform the decoding process on the intra-frame coding blocks according to the intra-frame coding technology to generate an intra-frame decoded result.