The present invention relates to specification of a tile capable of being independently processed to process a certain area at high speed in encoding and decoding of tiles resulting from division of an image in hierarchical coding of the image. An image encoding apparatus that performs the hierarchical coding of an input image with multiple layers includes an acquiring unit and an encoding unit. The acquiring unit acquires a first image generated from the input image and a second image having resolution different from that of the first image. In the encoding of a first area in the first image acquired by the acquiring unit, the encoding unit performs the encoding using a second area existing at the relatively same position as that of the first area in the first image in the second image as a reference image.