Wireless communication device, method and program

A wireless communication device whereby data quality matching the wireless communication state can be determined at the transmitting side alone. Wireless communication state judging unit judges the state of wireless communication with a master station, whereupon image quality decision unit determines quality of image to be encoded by an image encoding unit, in accordance with the wireless communication state, and image quality instruction unit instructs the image encoding unit to encode image with the quality determined by the image quality decision unit. Image acquired by a camera is encoded by the image encoding unit to obtain image data of the instructed quality, and the image encoded by the image encoding unit is transmitted by wireless communication unit to the master station by wireless.