To reduce deterioration in picture quality of an easily perceptible part in encoding and to improve subjective picture quality of an area that a human visually notices.

This image encoding device is equipped with a quantization step setting section which sets quantization steps by microblocks for an inputted image signal, an attention degree calculation section which calculates the degrees of attention indicating how much a user pays attention by the microblocks, a deterioration perception degree calculation section which calculates the degrees of deterioration perception numerically indicating how easily the user visually senses deterioration in picture quality by the microblocks, a quantization step correction section which corrects quantization steps based upon the calculated degrees of attention and the degrees of deterioration perception, and a quantization processing section which quantizes an image signal inputted through the corrected quantization steps.