PURPOSE: To decrease the transmission time of picture information as a whole by providing a circuit discriminating the property of a picture and a memory storing part carrier of coding to constitute the device that one of plural kinds of coding methods is selected from the result of the past career.

CONSTITUTION: A memory 13 storing which stores the state of either of two ways of run length code and direct code is being transmitted, and a run length memory 14 storing the run length just before are provided, and when the run length code is being transmitted, the number of times where run lengths being shorter than a threshold value TH1 are consecutive is counted by a counter 15 and only when the number of times reaches a prescribed number of times or over, the state is selected to the direct coding state and the run length coding is applied in other cases. On the other hand, in case of the direct coding, the direct coding is applied until a run length longer than the 2nd threshold value TH2 being equal to or larger than the threshold value TH1 is read from a run length counter 6. Thus, either the run length coding or the direct coding is selected depending on the past career.