Provided are an image processing apparatus and method for processing images. The image processing apparatus is connected to at least one camera and includes: a performance calculating unit configured to calculate a decoding performance of the at least one camera based on information about at least one of a codec, a resolution and a frame rate of image frames which are received from the at least one camera, and a filtering unit configured to filter the received image frames to select image frames for decoding, based on a result of the calculation of the decoding performance of the at least one camera.