IMAGE CODING METHOD

摘要

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To reduce the redundancy of an entire image without much degradation of image quality of a compressed image by discriminating whether an image vector of each pixel block depicts an edge part or a flat part and coding the image based on respectively suitable methods. SOLUTION: In the case of coding, image data 2 are checked for each block consisting of 4×4 pixels as to whether each block depicts an edge part or a flat part through the discrimination of a 4×4 pixel edge part/flat part discrimination means 3. Then a coding method with vector quantization with proper redundancy reduction in matching with properties of an image of an edge part and a flat part is selected in such a way that 48-dimensional vector quantization is applied to a block that is discriminated to be an edge part and 3-dimensional vector quantization is applied to a block that is discriminated to be a flat part. Thus, the redundancy of an entire image is reduced without much degradation of image quality of a compressed image.