This paper presents contour simplification method and a regional hierarchical segmentation algorithm based on PSNR for the transmission of image in mobile communication, of which available bandwidth is very limited. It first takes into account the global information and produces a coarse segmentation, that is, with a small number of regions. Then, each segmented region has different quality. Thus, the region with low quality is selected by PSNR and improved by introducing regions corresponding to more local information. It is able to improve the subjective quality of image and reduce contour information. In addition, contour simplification method is proposed for the efficient lossless chain coding. The proposed method can be applied to the applications such as mobile communications and videotelephone through PSTN, of which the available transmission bandwidth is very limited.