Abstract. We show how fractal image coding can be viewed and gen-eralized in terms of the method of projections onto convex sets (POCS). In this approach, the fractal code denes a set of spatial domain sim-ilarity constraints. We also show how such a reformulation in terms of POCS allows additional contraints to be imposed during fractal image decoding. Two applications are presented: image construction with an incomplete fractal code and image denoising.