An apparatus for encoding an image and an apparatus for decoding an image are presented. An image contains one or more regions. For encoding the image, the image is decomposed into one or more regions and a region is evaluated to determine whether the region meets a predetermined compressions acceptability criteria. The region is then encoded in response to the transformed and quantized region meeting the predetermined compression acceptability criteria. For decoding the image, a region of the image is selected and the selected region is decoded using metadata associated with the selected region. The metadata includes transformation quantization settings and information describing an aspect ratio used to compress the region.