PURPOSE: To quickly restart communication of normal pictures of high picture quality in the case of the occurrence of encoding error.

CONSTITUTION: An encoding circuit 22 compresses and encodes input picture information. If encoding error is detected in the encoding circuit 22, an error detecting circuit 23 outputs an error detection signal to an encoding control circuit 26 and stops the encoding operation of the encoding circuit 22 till the next frame. The encoding control circuit 26 outputs a clear control signal of encoded data after the error occurrence position in the encoded frame, where encoding error occurs, to a smoothing buffer 24. The smoothing buffer 24 clears data in a designated part in accordance with the clear control signal. At the time of transfer to the processing of the next frame which is not affected by this encoding error, the encoding circuit 22 executes the normal compression code encoding processing.