SCENE CHARACTERISTICS DETECTION TYPE VIDEO ENCODING APPARATUS

A scene characteristics detection type motion video encoding apparatus is provided for minimizing the degradation of picture quality derived from the point of scene change. The filtering characteristic (namely a filter factor) of a spatiotemporal filter is updated in response to the scene attribute data (a) received from a scene change point detector and the encoding difficulty data (b) received from an encoding difficulty estimator. Accordingly, when the encoding difficulty is high, high frequency components of the input video signal are eliminated. A rate controller determines the target amount of data to be encoded using scene attribute data (a) and the encoding difficulty data (b). When the point of scene change is detected, the target amount of data to be encoded for the input video signal which is distanced by a given distance from the point of scene change is weighted for matching with the encoding difficulty by a weighting factor Wsc (>1.0). As a result, the number of bits allocated to the input video signal can be increased thus minimizing the degradation of picture quality derived from the point of scene change.