Embodiments of this application disclose a decoding method includes: obtaining a bitstream including picture data; parsing the bitstream to obtain node split mode information of a first-level coding tree and node split mode information of a second-level coding tree, if the split mode corresponding to the first node is no further splitting, parsing the bitstream to obtain encoding information of the first node; and decoding and reconstructing, based on the encoding information of the first node, a coding unit corresponding to the first node, to obtain a picture corresponding to the picture data.