A television signal coding system which achieves stable coding efficiency in both stationary and moving picture. This invention is directed to such a predictive coding system in which for predicting a first picture element in a certain field, use is made of sampled values of a second picture element lying next to the first picture element on the left on the same line and picture elements in the same field such as the third and fourth picture elements lying on the line second as counted upwardly from the line of the first picture element and sampled values of picture elements on the line immediately underlying the line of the first and second picture elements but in the previous field. In this invention, a comparison operation is made between restored values obtained by the intra-field predictive coding and the inter-field predictive coding, and one of coders which has provided a restored value closer to a true picture element value is adaptively used as an input signal coder. This makes it possible to utilize high coding efficiency by the inter-field coding in a case of a stationary picture and stable coding efficiency by the intra-field coding in a case of a moving picture.