An encoding scheme dynamically adjusts a quantization rounding offset parameter used for encoding pictures according to statistics of previously encoded pictures of similar type. A look-up table can be used to store different relative quantization rounding offset parameters associated with different numbers of bits required to encode the pictures. The dynamically adjusted quantization rounding offset scheme achieves better coding performance at high bit rates. In one example, the dynamic quantization offset values are applied to a Uniform-Reconstruction-Quantizer (URQ) used for Laplacian sources.