Image scaling is a very important technique and has been widely used in many image processing applications. In this paper, we present an edge-oriented area-pixel scaling processor. To achieve the goal of low cost, the area-pixel scaling technique is implemented with a low-complexity VLSI architecture in our design. A simple edge catching technique is adopted to preserve the image edge features effectively so as to achieve better image quality. Compared with the previous low-complexity techniques, our method performs better in terms of both quantitative evaluation and visual quality. The seven-stage VLSI architecture of our image scaling processor contains 10.4-K gate counts and yields a processing rate of about 200 MHz by using TSMC 0.18-mum technology.