Several coding methods have been developed in order to reduce the amount of information
required to represent images. Although these methods use different approaches, there are
common basis that may be used to understand and compare them.
The objective of this thesis is to present the most important image coding approaches,
such as predictive, transform, subband and fractal coding, through a common framework
grounded on two general basis: the Coding Theory, and the decomposition of the coding
process in the following steps: "Transform of Representation", "Quantization" and "Code-
Word Assignment (Entropy Coding)".