Abstract Generalized Lloyd Algorithm(GLA) is important in vector quantizer design. It runs fast, but it is sensitive to initial conditions and it may find a local optimum. We propose an improved approach based on GLA, named vector quantized codebook reorganization algorithm (VQCRA). VQCRA finds better codebooks in less time, and is insensitive to initial conditions as compared with GLA.. The experiments are performed on the 10 images extracted from USC-SIPI Image Database. The performance improvement ranges from 7.3% (the size of the codebook is 32) to 46.4% (the size of the codebook is 512)