At low bit rate

images reconstructed from wavelet transform-based algorithms have blurred edges

which is called Gibbs effect.This effect hampers the recognition of objects in the image.This paper presents a new progressive image coder which employs edge detection to improve the visual appearance and possibility of recognizing the compressed images at very low bit rates.Edge information is enhanced before compression coding considering some certain weighting factors.Experimental results show that the new algorithm can yield highly recognizable images at very low bit rates.