Patent ID: 7023914

Claim:
A video encoding apparatus comprising: a feature amount computation unit configured to divide an input video signal into a plurality of scenes each comprising at least one temporally-continuous frame, and compute a statistical feature amount for each scene; an encoding parameter generator to generate an encoding parameter for each scene based on the statistical feature amount computed by the feature amount computation unit; a number-of-generated-bits prediction unit configured to predict the number of bits to be generated when the input video signal is encoded using the encoding parameter generated by the encoding parameter generator; an encoding parameter correcting unit configured to correct the encoding parameter based on a result of the prediction of the number of generated bits which is obtained by the number-of-generated-bits prediction unit; an encoder to encode the input video signal using the corrected encoding parameter and generate an encoded bit stream; and an output unit configured to output the encoded bit stream generated by the encoder as an encoded output, wherein the encoding parameter generator includes a setting unit configured to correct a frame rate as well as a quantization step by setting a weighted parameter to the frame rate as well as setting a weighted parameter to the quantization step size for macro blocks of frames to be encoded for each scene on the bases of the statistical feature amount relating to a distribution of luminance for each macro block.