This paper presents a fuzzy system that adaptively classifies subimages to four classes according to image activity distribution. In adaptive transform image coding, subimage classification improves the compression performance by assigning different bit maps to different classes. A conventional classification method sorts subimages by their AC energy and divides them to classes with equal number of subimages. The fuzzy system provides more flexible classification to natural images with various distribution of image details than does the conventional method. Clustering of training data in the input-output product space generated the fuzzy rules for subimage classification. The fuzzy system of small number of fuzzy rules successfully classified subimages to improve the compression performance of the transform image coding without sorting of AC energies.