The purpose of this project is to investigate a large variety of applications requiring generic compression techniques, among which there are telecommunication and multimedia applications. Some of these applications require a high measurement precision an daccurate image analysis as well as a fast interaction with the image data. Specific aspects that will be studied are the strongly variable requirements for these different applications (as there are telepublising- see IWT project with Barco teleradiology - see IWT project with Agfa satellite image processing- see Telsat 4 project). Priviledged research topics are (1) multi resolution techniques that support amongst others adaptive image compression and progressive transmission schemes, (2) techniques leading to large compression ratios without loss of significant information, (3) establishing large data flows by optimisation of codes, algorithms and processing architectures. A specific point of interest concerning the current project is the compression of image sequences and the therefor required movement estimation The research that was started in previous projects (see OZR project: Generic methods for digital image processing and computer vision) about architectures and parallellisation of algorithms will be extended towards compression of moving images. The formulation of locally adaptive quality criteria is a subject that was already studied in former projects, on one hand for subband coding based on wavelets, and on the other hand for certain applications of segment coding of motionless images in this project the image quality criteria and the controll of the (local) image quality will be studied in a systematic way.