Information processing apparatus and method which selectively controls data encoding by monitoring amount of encoded data

摘要

The invention provides an information processing apparatus in which data is encoded with a desired compression ratio without producing significant degradation in the quality of the encoded data. The apparatus includes: a monitor for monitoring the amount of encoded image data which has already been generated prior to current image data to be encoded; and an encoder for encoding the current image data to be encoded selectively using either a reversible encoding algorithm or an irreversible encoding algorithm wherein the encoding algorithm is selected depending on the above-described amount of codes.