The present technology relates to an image processing apparatus and method that enable suppression of increase in the load of encoding and decoding floating point-precision image data. The image processing apparatus of the present technology transforms floating point-precision image data composed of a sign, an exponent, and a mantissa into integer-precision image data, and encodes the integer-precision image data obtained by transformation. The present technology can be applied to image processing apparatuses such as encoding apparatuses that encode image data and decoding apparatuses that decode encoded data obtained by encoding image data, for example.