1. A method of compressing a digitized image comprising the steps of: division of the image into blocks Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) of each block of the image, representation of each DCT block as a binary bit-plane, characterized in that the DCT coefficients are scanned and transmitted in an order of decreasing bit-plane significance and, for each bit-plane, in a diagonal scan order starting from the upper left corner and ending in the lower right corner of each DCT block.