This paper presents image data compression using a classified vector quantization (CVQ) which categories edge blocks according to the energy distribution of subimages in the discrete cosine transform domain. Classifying the edge blocks enhances visual quality of the compressed images while maintaining a high compression ratio. The proposed classification method categories subimages into eight lypes of edge features according to an energy distribution. A neural network, trained with the data generated from the proposed classification method, can successfully classify subimages to eight edge categories. Experimental results are given to show how the (1VQ method incorporatd with a neural network can produce faithful compressed image quality for high compression ratios.