1. A method of producing a video image from a compressed version of a source video image which has been compressed by transforming to a transform domain and quantizing said source video image in accordance with quantization constraints, comprising: inverse transforming from said transform domain and dequantizing said compressed version to produce a first decompressed video image; reducing total variation in said first decompressed video image by reducing lengths of level pixel sets in the image as a function of spatial oscillation of each level set to produce a reduced variation image; transforming said reduced variation image to produce a revised transform and conforming said revised transform with said quantization constraints of said compressed version so as to produce a constrained transform; and inverse transforming said constrained transform so as to produce a replica of said source video image.