Patent US 6,801,574

A video signal layering-encoding system has at least either a frequency distribution unit to judge a frequency distribution in an input video signal or a motion judgment unit to judge the motion of an input video signal. With this, encoding quantity control according to the characteristics of the input video signal can be performed between layers. Also, with selection of encode modes and sharing of a motion vector, the encoded data of a bidirectionally predicted frame can be reduced and the encoding efficiency of a high resolution signal can be increased.