It is intended to enable detection of a scene change image in accordance with a feature of an image from a continuous image sequence； a feature region is extracted from each image in the continuous image sequence by a feature-region extracting unit (22), and a detecting unit (23) sets a condition of image-to-image change detection to be varied on the basis of a feature amount of the extracted feature region and detects a change among a plurality of images, so that in addition to a simple image-to-image change detection, detection of image-to-image change detection with the setting of a condition of image-to-image change detection taking a level of importance into consideration can be made by using the feature amount of the extracted feature region； thus, it is possible to detect a scene change image in accordance with a feature of an image from a continuous image sequence.
