The present invention relates to a method of and apparatus for compression encoding of a picture in a picture sequence. In particular, the invention relates to a method of and apparatus for compression encoding of a picture in a picture sequence so as to maintain a good picture quality while providing compression coding and decoding with low latency. The invention provides a method of compression encoding a picture in a picture sequence in which the pictures in the picture sequence are coded as prediction coded pictures with a single reference picture and have at least two macroblock sets. One set is a refresh set in which the macroblocks are intra-picture coded. The decoded compression coded picture information used for compression coding picture information is decoded without use of a de-blocking filter.