IMAGE ENCODER

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To significantly reduce buffers for an encoding delay and a data delay without lowering prediction performance of prediction encoding.SOLUTION: By referring to a frame of the same time as a camera disposed at a right-hand neighbor, encoding timing of a reference destination image is made delayed by several block encoding time in reference to a reference original image. When a prediction error in referring to an image of the camera at the right-hand neighbor is equal to or larger than a preset value, an image of a camera positioned at further right side or a preceding image photographed by a self-camera is encoded as a reference origin.