An image compression method for compressing groups of pixel data,
including the following steps: MSB portions and LSB portions of the pixel
data are compressed separately. Further, the LSB portions are grouped
according to their associated MSB portions so that similar pixels are
compressed together to gain higher a compression ratio. Some LSB portions
are truncated to ensure a compression ratio. When performing compression,
enhanced variable-length coding is adopted that predicts more accurate
dividers by considering weighted combination of adjacent pixels. The
quotient of each groups of compression portion is predicted and coded
accordingly.