Patent ID: 8218626

Claim:
An encoding control apparatus for controlling encoding of a moving image in units of macroblocks, comprising: a variance calculation unit configured to calculate a variance of an encoding target macroblock; a sum-of-absolute-difference calculation unit configured to calculate a sum of absolute differences between the encoding target macroblock and a reference macroblock; a setting unit configured to set, based on the variance and the sum of absolute differences, a standard for determining whether to skip encoding of the encoding target macroblock; a prediction unit configured to perform motion compensation prediction on the encoding target macroblock to obtain a motion-compensated prediction value; a determination unit configured to determine whether to skip encoding of the encoding target macroblock by comparing the motion-compensated prediction value with the standard; and at least one programmable microprocessor configured to implement at least the variance calculation unit, the sum-of-absolute-difference calculation unit, and the setting unit; wherein the standard is different when the variance is smaller than a first threshold value and the sum of absolute differences is greater than a second threshold value than when the variance is greater than the first threshold value or the sum of absolute differences is smaller than the second threshold value.