Abstract: In this paper, a new image coding algorithm based on adaptive scanning for high frequency subbands is presented It can be viewed as an improved version of EZW algorithm Unlike EZW, the lowest frequency subband is coded separately from other highpass subbands, the coefficients in a high frequency subband are scanned adaptively in the order of human visual system（HVS） importance, and the complex context modeling is adopted in the compression algorithm The experiment results show that the new image compression scheme performs better than that of EZW in the aspects of recovery image quality, encoding/decoding time, etc