The invention relates to a method and a device for regulating the encoding bit rate of video images relative to a target image size). The images being subdivided into zones to be encoded, the complexity of encoding of each zone is distinguished among the zones, the zones to be encoded are classified according to a determined order of complexity, each zone is successively encoded according to the decreasing order of complexity, successively minimizing the estimated encoding error of each zone, the final size of each image relative to the target size and the bit rate of the sequence of video images. Application to the video encoding of images of video sequences, in particular to networked video surveillance.