[[abstract]]Several effective low bit rate still image compression methods have been presented in these two years, such as SPHIT [9], Hybrid VQ [7], Wu and Chen method [10]. These methods exercise the analysis techniques (wavelet or subband) before distributing the bit rate to each piece of image, thus the tradeoff between bit rate and distortion can be resolved. In this paper, we try to propose a simple but comparable method that adopts the technique of side match VQ only. Side match vector quantization (SMVQ) is an efficient VQ coding scheme for low bit rate coding. Conventional side match (two-sided) utilizes the codeword information of two neighboring blocks to predict the state codebook of an input vector. In this paper, we propose a h...