An efficient wavelet packet algorithm to find wavelet packet quickly is presented in this paper. The top-down method maximizing the transform coding gain that is obtained from the second moment of the band is used to divide the subbands into wavelet tree. The bit allocation for each band in the tree is performed in proportion to its variance. Bands are coded by the lossless coding algorithm called the bit plane run length coding(BPRLC) and uniform quantizer. The proposed algorithm is compared with of the single tree algorithim proposed by Ramchandran and Vetterli. To verify the efficiency of our algorithm, simulations are jperformed using several sets of images. The results show us that our method reduces the execution time by about forty percent of that required by the single tree method while maintaining the comparable reconstructed image qualities.