Since SAR data has characteristics such as high dynamic range,coherent speckle,and significant high frequency components arising from terrain texture and edges,a new algorithm referred to as the wavelet packet-based subband coding scheme for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data compression is adopted.Wavelet packet decomposition is adopted to exploit middle and high frequency components associated with SAR data.Then the coefficients are used to construct the band-cross vector and new vector quantization technologies are used in this algorithm.Simulation shows that this method can be realized easily and compress the wavelet image efficiently under lower coding rate.