In this paper we propose a region-adaptive CELP image coder for still images at low bit rates below 0.5 bpp. The proposed method partitions the image into stochastically similar regions by the minimum spanning tree method and finds prediction coefficients for each region using a 2- dimensional linear prediction model. Coding is carried out on 8$ imes$8 blocks and when there are several regions included in a block, an image is synthesized using the prediction coefficients of each region. Computer simulation results show that the proposed method allows improved synthesized image over conventional block-adaptive CELP methods, especially at edges. In addition, performance comparison with the JPEG DCT method shows that while the JPEG method shows block distortion and staircase effects (ragged edges) at bit rates below 0.5 bpp, the proposed CELP method shows improved synthesized images with such effects reduced.