The infrared target image has the characteristics of blur edges,much noise and low contrast etc.By analyzing the three evaluation criteria,this paper studied the effect of different wavelet basis on performance of SPIHT algorithm of infrared target image through carrying out a large number of experiments and statistics.Through analysis and discussion of experiment results,the conclusion that D9/7 wavelet and Bior4.4 wavelet are propitious to real-time compression of infrared target image,which will also contribute much to exert potential coding ability of SPIHT algorithm.