In this paepr, a new image segmentation method reducing efficiently contour information causing bottleneck problem at segmentatio-based very low bit rate codingis proposed, while preserving objective and subjective quality. It consists of 4-level hierarchical image segmentation based on mathematical morphology and 1-leve region merging structure using contast of two adjacent regions. For two adjacent region pairs at the fourth level included in each region of the thid level, contrast is calculated. Among the pairs of two adjacent regions with less value than threshold, two adjacent regions having the minimum contrast are merged first. After region merging, texture of the merged region is updated. The procedure is performed recursively for all the adjacent region pairs at the fourth level included in each region of the third level. Compared with the previous method, the objective and subjective image qualities are similar. But it reduces 46.65% texture information on the average by decreasing total region number to be tansmitted. Specially, it shows reduction of the 23.95% contour information of the average. Thus, it can improve efficiently the bottleneck problem at segementation-based very low bit rate coding.