VQ-BTC is a recent technique used in the coding of image data to comba
t edge degradation produced by vector quantisation (VQ) or block trunc
ation coding (BTC). However, it has high encoding complexity and needs
a large amount of memory to store 31 codebooks at both the encoder an
d decoder. A modified VQ-BTC (MVQ-BTC) algorithm is presented which ac
hieves a performance close to that of VQ-BTC, but needs only three cod
ebooks, and requires less computation time than VQ-BTC.