Abstract: A brief review of fractal block coding is given and then a new fast encoding algorithm is proposed. L 2 metric is replaced with L 1 metric and the searching procedure is made the same as that of VQ, so that many fast searching methods similar to VQ can be adopted. Also discussed is how to dispose the flat（or smooth） block and present a new partition method.By these ways, a better result is obtained. Compared with other algorithms of the fractal block coding, this algorithm greatly shortens the time of encoding and the quality of the recovered image is improved.In particular, it dramatically reduces the blocking effect and increases the compression ratio.