To compress transmission value of stereoscopic video signals in consideration of the stereoscopic visual characteristics by coding the depth value so as to preferentially assign the transmission value to the frequency component of high perception sensitivity according to the time and space characteristics defined to the visual depth change, when an image sent from the visual point direction and the depth value corresponding to the image are transmitted.

Information on the left eye images 11 of an input terminal are inputted to a coding part 103 and a depth estimating part 101, and the information on the right eye images 12 are inputted to the part 101 via the input terminal. The part 101 estimates the depth value, corresponding to every pixel of the left eye image information by referring to the right and left image information. A depth information compression part 102 performs processing to compress the depth information in consideration of the visual characteristics. In regard to the configuration of the part 102, a post-quantization step of the DCT processing is controlled to compress the quantity of information. Otherwise, the quantity of information may be compressed after the direct filter processing is applied with respect to the depth value in the space direction.