Provided are an apparatus for multi-stage transforming a plurality of unit blocks in multi-dimension that can improve compression efficiency of video data by collecting Discrete Cosine Transforming (DCT) coefficients of neighboring blocks and performing an additional transformation based on the DCT coefficients of an original picture and a differential picture. The method includes the steps of: performing a Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) on inputted picture data and selecting R blocks of a predetermined size from DCT picture data, where R is a natural number equal to or greater than 2; arranging DCT coefficients of each of the selected R blocks according to each frequency in one-dimension; and performing one-dimensional transformation again on the DCT coefficients arranged in one-dimension.