Long-term cultures of polarized airway epithelial cells from CF patients

An image processing method and an image processing apparatus in which a DCT section transforms image data to a frequency conversion coefficient using a discrete cosine transform coefficient, a quantizing section quantizes the transformed frequency conversion coefficient using a quantization coefficient indicating weighing in quantization, a Huffman encoding section encodes the quantized data, and a CPU detects a code rate for encoded data by a prespecified time interval during execution of processing for encoding the data quantized by the encoding means and changes the quantization coefficient during processing for encoding according to the detected code rate.