The invention provides a method of and a device for coding (10*) an image sequence (g(i,j,k)). The device (10*) has a noise filter (12) for noise filtering (12) the image sequence (g(i,j,k)), and for regarding the noise filtering (12) as a rate-distortion optimization problem in order to adapt the response of the noise filter (12). In particular, a filter parameter set (C) is determined to adapt the response of the filter (12) in that the image sequence (g(i,j,k)) is encoded using an optimal bit-budget, which is the bit-budget used for compressing a noise-free image sequence, and the distortion for the given bit-budget is minimized. A solution of the rate-distortion problem is proposed that calculates (12) the filter parameter set (C) by a Lagrange multiplier method. Separate minimization is used to determine each parameter of the parameter set (C) independently. In a practical embodiment, a spatial adaptive weighted averaging (SAWA) filtering (23) is used to estimate the bit budget (R^f*) and to pre-filter the image sequence (g(i,j,k)).