1. A method of image compression comprising the steps of: analyzing an image in terms of perceptual constructs of the human visual system; searching for patterns among analyzed abstractions of the image; describing the image in terms of the perceptual constructs and the patterns found among them; for a given image that is in a same “class” as the image, re-representing the image by describing the image as a collection of parameterized versions of the patterns prevalent in that class of image; taking a resulting description outside of the context of abstract patterns; and looking for redundancies in the description, then re-representing the data so as to eliminate the redundancies and thereby compress the description.