ENCODING APPARATUS WITH TWO STAGES OF DATA COMPRESSION

In a highly efficient encoding apparatus, image data are encoded by multiple encoding techniques so as to obtain highly compressed image data. For example, a block segmentation circuit segments received digital image data into a plurality of relatively small blocks each having a plurality of pixels, and such small blocks are encoded by a block encoding circuit so as to compress the pixel data in each of the small blocks. The output data of the block encoding circuit are encoded by a predictive encoding circuit so as to obtain highly compressed image data.