We propowe a variable block-size transform coding. The size of transform block is adapted by the activity of the block, If the activity is lower than the given threshold, then the block-size is enlarged. In this paper, we use the energy of the transformed cofficients with high frrequency instead of the block variance as the block activity. The computer simulation results show that the reconstruction image by the proposed activeity measure gives superior picture quality to that by the block variance and the mean absolute difference.