IMAGE COMPRESSION DEVICE AND METHOD

An image compression device is disclosed that is capable of quickly compressing image data to a target value by a simple configuration while maintaining quality of a reproduced image as much as possible. The image compression device includes an encoding part, a code reduction part, and a processing part. The encoding part performs a frequency analysis for original image data, encodes the coefficients generated by the frequency analysis first unit by first unit, and generates a series of codes. The code reduction part reduces the amount of the codes of each of the first units. The processing part divides the coefficients or the codes of each of the first units into second units, and increases the amount of codes to be reduced in the code reduction part for each of the second units according to values of the coefficients or the codes of each of the second units.