To provide an image transmission method for controlling retransmission according to the importance of an image wherein hierarchical coding is used to provide an importance for each hierarchy, and which can prevent reduction of encoding efficiency caused by hierarchizing and can eliminate the need for hardware and software resources for encoding for each hierarchy.
A bit counter 214 counts a code quantity contained in one transmission unit, an importance deciding part 217 divides the code quantity counted by the counter 214 by the number of encoding macroblocks contained in one transmission unit to calculate an average code quantity per encoding macroblock, and a threshold comparator 220 compares the average code quantity with a threshold calculated based on the frame rate and the bit rate.
IDO TAIJI
MIYAZAKI AKIHIRO
HATA KOICHI
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