An image compression apparatus includes a 4 x 4 weighted digital cosine transformer (22). A zigzag circuit (24) is coupled to the DCT transformer. A Q-factor estimator (26) is coupled to DCT transformer. A DC coding circuit (28) is coupled to zigzag circuit and a quantization circuit (30) is coupled to zigzag and the Q-factor circuits. A run-length (32) circuit is connected to the DC coding.
