Patent ID: 8160139

Claim:
An adaptive quantizer for coding pictures carried by an input video signal, the pictures including first pictures to be coded with motion-compensated prediction and second pictures to be coded with no motion-compensated prediction, comprising: an input-picture activity detector to obtain activities of the input video signal for a plurality of subblocks that compose each of a plurality of macroblocks that compose each picture of the input video signal, detect a smallest activity among the activities and output the smallest activity as an input-activity per macroblock; an error activity detector to obtain activities of a motion-compensated predictive signal gained in the motion-compensated prediction per first picture and activities of the input video signal per second picture, for the subblocks of each macroblock, obtain a mean value of the obtained activities per macroblock for each of the first and second pictures, and output the mean value as an error activity per macroblock; an adjustment amount controller to obtain a mean error activity of error activities in each picture and compare the error activity per macroblock with the mean error activity in each picture; and a quantization step-size adjuster to adjust per macroblock a quantization step size to be used in quantization of the video signal, according to the input-picture activity, so that the quantization step size becomes smaller when the error activity is equal to or larger than the mean error activity than when the error activity is smaller than the mean error activity.