Abstract: A method of compressing a current image of a sequence of images is disclosed. The current image is transformed (502) with a predetermined transform to provide a set of transform coefficients, which are divided into blocks. An encoding termination condition is determined (714) for at least one block, and the block is encoded (605) in a series of coding passes. In a current coding pass, a performance measure is predicted, and encoding is terminated if the performance measure satisfies the encoding termination condition. Different color components may be given different weightings (713).