COMMUNICATION APPARATUS AND METHOD OF COLOR PICTURES AND CONTINUALLY-CHANGING TONE PICTURES

A sending port makes compressed digital data of continually-tone changing picture or color picture by inputting the continually tone changing picture or color picture, dividing the original picture into regions having pixels of similar tones, making an average tone image by drawing the regions with the average tones, determining boundaries between neighboring regions, extracting branch points at which more than two boundaries joins, extracting turning points at which the gradient turns discontinuously, approximating subboundaries having ends of turning points or branch points by piecewise polynomials, making a subtracting image by subtracting the average tone image from the original picture, and sending the compressed data; transmitting media transmits the compressed data from the sending port to a receiving port through telephone lines, exclusive lines or wireless; the receiving port retrieves the boundaries, the regions, the average tone image, the subtracted image and the original picture.