In this paper, we propose a robust preprocessing scheme for entropy coding in gray-level image. The issue of this paper is to reduce additional information needed when bit stream is transmitted. The proposed scheme uses the preprocessing method of co-occurrence count about gray-levels in neighboring pixels. That is, gray-levels are substituted by their ranked numbers without additional information. From the results of computer simulation, it is verified that the proposed scheme could be reduced the compression bit rate by up to 44.1%, 37.5% comparing to the entropy coding and conventional preprocessing scheme respectively. So our scheme can be successfully applied to the application areas that require of losslessness and data compaction.