A concept of image compression based stratified variable blocksize decomposition is proposed after analyzing current image compression algorithms compreehensively. As the current most popular methods for static image compression

JPEG

JPEG2000 and fractal perform similarly when compressing different images with the same compression ratio: the more visually complex an image is

the lower a restored image quality is. After a large number of experiments

previous work shows that there is a clear relationship between all the three methods and image activity measure (IAM). According to the complexity of different image regions

stratified variable blocksize decomposition (SVBD) is achieved

using IAM and similarity as performance index. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is used to find optimal approximation of the image blocks. Finally

by classifying the image blocks

some improvement to compression quality can be made.