The invention provides a method of terminable spatial tree-based position coding and decoding, and corresponding coding and decoding apparatus. The encoding method comprises: constructing a cell around the input spatial points; recursively dividing the cell into sub-cells at different layers; and assigning a symbol for each sub-cell indicating whether or not there is a spatial point within each sub-cell. The method further comprising: terminating further division of a sub-cell, if the sub-cell contains only one point and the distance between the center point of the sub-cell and the point contained in the sub-cell is smaller than the allowed maximal error.