a technique for encoding and decoding an image includes the following steps : subsampling the image to obtain a number of subsampled frames of spatially offset image - representative signals ; transforming each of the subsampled frames to obtain a corresponding number of frames of transform coefficient - representative signals ; forming vector - representative signals from corresponding coefficient - representative signals of the respective frames of coefficient - representative signals ; performing a thresholding operation on the vector - representative signals to obtain thresholded vector - representative signals ; vector quantizing the thresholded vector - representative signals to obtain encoded signals ; storing the encoded signals ; and decoding the encoded signals to obtain a recovered version of the image .