Wavelet transform is widely used for high compression ratio image compression. It requeires a large memory when it is implemented by a hardware. Therefore, it is efficient to divide the entire image into blocks. Because the wavelet transform for divided blocks causes losses, pixels of the adjacent blocks are used. In the case of color image compression, the image is decomposed into brightness and color components, and then color components are downsampled. When the wavelet transform is performed by using pixels of adjacentblocks, the number of necessary pixels are doubled due to downsampling of color components. In this paper, we propose an efficient block wavelet transform using variablefilter length for brightness and color components. By using the proposed method, the number of pixels of adjacent blocks is optimized. We show the degradation of image quality due to the reduction of filter length for color components is negligible through simulations.