Incremental image compression techniques using priori information are of significance to deal with the explosively increasing remote-sensing image data. However, the potential benefi ts of priori information are still to be evaluated quantitatively for effi cient compression scheme designing. In this paper, we present a k-nearest neighbor(k-NN) based bypass image entropy estimation scheme, together with the corresponding mutual information estimation method. Firstly, we apply the k-NN entropy estimation theory to split image blocks, describing block-wise intra-frame spatial correlation while avoiding the curse of dimensionality. Secondly, we propose the corresponding mutual information estimator based on feature-based image calibration and straight-forward correlation enhancement. The estimator is designed to evaluate the compression performance gain of using priori information. Numerical results on natural and remote-sensing images show that the proposed scheme obtains an estimation accuracy gain by 10% compared with conventional image entropy estimators. Furthermore, experimental results demonstrate both the effectiveness of the proposed mutual information evaluation scheme, and the quantitative incremental compressibility by using the priori remote-sensing frames. Incremental image compression techniques using priori information are of significance to deal with the explosively increasing increasing remote-sensing image data. However, the potential benefi ts of priori information are still to be evaluated quantitatively for effi cient compression scheme designing. In this paper, we present Firstly, we apply the k-NN entropy estimation theory to split image blocks, describing block-wise intra-frame spatial correlation while avoiding the curse of dimensionality. Secondly, we propose the corresponding mutual information estimator based on feature-based image calibration and straight-forward correlation enhancement. The estimator is designed to evaluate the compression performance gain of using priori information. Numerical results on natural and remote-sensing images show that the proposed scheme obtains an estimation a ccuracy gain by 10% compared with conventional image entropy estimators. The quantitative results compressibility by using the priori remote-sensing frames.