In this paper, a new method capable of effectively coding arbitrarity-shaped image regions is presented. The image region is spanned into the 8 8 rectangular block and its intermediate luminances are interpolated. After all liminances in the 8 8 block are obtained from pixels in the region, they are transformed by 8 8 DCT. The proposed extension/interpolation (EL) method is compared with conventional ones, such as SA-DCT, mean stuffing, etc., under three aspects: peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), hardware complexity, and the flexibility for improvement of performance. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed method is superior to that of the conventional ones. In addition, we introduce an improved version by repetitively performing the EL method.