IMAGE CODING APPARATUS AND METHOD

An original image shot by a shooting unit is read in a frame buffer and transformed by a wavelet transformer. An evaluating unit monitors the coefficients of the HL, LH, HH sub-bands generated by the wavelet transformer and checks the number of the high frequency components in the original image. If there are sufficient high frequency components, the quality of the original image is judged to be good, and if not, the image quality is judged not to be good because of camera shake or the like. The evaluating unit sends a coding indication signal to a quantizer if the image quality is good. Thereby the wavelet transformed image is coded. If the image quality is not good, the evaluating unit sends a re-shooting indication signal to the shooting unit.