In this paper, we investigate on the techniques for still image compression based on the wavelet transform, which will be adopted as a part of the MPEG-4 compression standards. Also we propose an effective still image compression technique, which is simpler than the MPEG-4 compression method and is improved by using a visually weighted quantizer based to HVS(Human Visual System), Simulations are carried out and compared with the algorithm proposed in MPEG-4. The simulation results show that the proposed method in this paper gives much better image quality than that of the method in MPEG-4. Also, except the case where the compression ratio is high, it shows that the proposed method has lower in complexity and provides a better subjective and objective image quality than EZW in most cases. Since wavelet transform well reflects HVS, the compressed image rarely causes blocking artifact compared with JPEG, and in most cases, it shows considerable quality improvement over JPEG.