An efficient embedded subband image coding algorithm based on the discrete cosine transform (DCT) is presented in this paper.Xiong et al.'s EZDCT scheme employs the zerotree structure and fulfills a DCT-based embedded zerotree quantizer with its performance outperforming any other DCT-based coders

including the baseline JPEG and improved JPEG.We point out the zerotree structure of DCT coefficients is not effcient in embedded codec.We proposed an effcient embedded subband coder for the DCT image (ESDCT)

without relying on the zerotree structure.A comparison reveals that the PSNR results of our ESDCT are 0.5-1.5 dB higher than those of EZDCT.The compression performance is close to the popular embedded wavelet-based SPIHT

slightly superior to SPIHT in some cases.