The postprocessing of compressed images based on the projections onto convex sets and the constrained minimization imposes several constraints on the procesed data. The quantization constraint has been commonly used in various algorithms. Quantization is many-to-one mapping, by which all the dat in a quantization region are mapped to the corresponding representative level. The basic idea behind the projection onto the QCS(quantization constraint set) is to prevent the processed data from diverging from the original quantization region in order to redue the artifacts caused by filtering in postprocessing. However, there have been few efforts to analye the POQCS(projection onto the QCS). This paper analyzed mathematically the POQCS of filtered data from the viewpoint of minimizing the mean square error. Our analysis shows that a proper filtering technique followed by the POQCS can reduce the quantization distortion. In the conventional POQCS, the outside data of each quantization region are mapped into the corresponding boundary. Our analysis also shows that mappingthe outside data to the boundary of a subregion of the quantization region yields lower distortion than does the mapping to the boundary of the original region. In addition, several examples and discussions on the theory are introduced.