Patent ID: 8774268

Claim:
A moving image encoding apparatus that encodes pictures that are continuously inputted, the apparatus comprising: an encoding unit which encodes the inputted pictures block by block according to a given encoding parameter to generate encoded data, the block being configured of a plurality of pixels; a decoding unit which decodes encoded data obtained from a picture of interest; a distortion amount calculation unit which calculates a difference in a boundary position between the blocks between a picture obtained through decoding by the decoding unit and a picture before being encoded as a picture distortion amount; a scene encoding distortion amount calculation unit which calculates a scene encoding distortion amount for a group of pictures (GOP) from the picture distortion amounts of pictures in the GOP that includes at least one intra-picture and has been previously encoded; a setting unit which sets a target distortion amount based on an image quality level that is designated by that a user operates a predetermined operation unit and information in which the relationship between the target distortion amount and the image quality level is described as a target image quality; an encoding distortion bit rate conversion unit which calculates a corrected bit rate by calculating a difference between the target distortion amount set by said setting unit and the scene encoding distortion amount calculated by the scene encoding distortion amount calculation unit, and multiplying the calculated difference by an encoding distortion bit rate conversion coefficient; and a target bit rate calculation unit which calculates a target bit rate for a picture subsequent to the picture of interest by adding a current target bit rate to the corrected bit rate calculated by the encoding distortion bit rate conversion unit, and sets, into the encoding unit, the calculated target bit rate as the encoding parameter for the picture subsequent to the picture of interest.