This paper proposes a method for multi-polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image compression based on three-dimensional matrix transform according to the correlation between the polarimetric channels.The multi-polarimetric SAR images (HH

HV

VV) are considered as a three dimensional unit

and then are processed by three dimensional matrix transform including.One-Dimensional DCT transform among the polarimetric channels and Two-dimensional DWT transform in the polarimetric SAR image.The three mixed coefficient planes are allocated different bits according to the Rate-Distortion(R-D) criteria and encoded by SPIHT algorithm.This method doesn’t process every channel image separately

so it removes the correlation of the image inside and the correlation between the polarimetric channels.Both the theory and the experimental results show that the method in this paper is efficient for multi-polarimetric SAR image compression.