Patent US 5,721,791

An image information coding apparatus includes a cut-out or extracting unit for cutting out image information into blocks each having a predetermined size, e.g., 4.times.4 pixels, a preprocessing unit such as an orthogonal transformation unit (e.g., a Hadamard transformation unit) and a scalar quantization unit for performing predetermined preprocessing of the block as a matrix, a separator for separating a plurality of components (e.g., phase information, amplitude information, and zero information) from each element of the preprocessed matrix, information quantizers for coding individual pieces of information constituted by each component, and a synthesizer for synthesizing coding results.