Data compression is very important for the storage and transmission of informations. EZW image compression algorithm has been widely used in real application due to its high compression performance. In the EZW algorithm, when a new significant coefficient is generated, its children are all encoded, although its all descendants may be insignificant, and thus its performance is declined. In this paper, we proposed an improved EZW algorithm using IS(Isolated Significant) symbol, which checks all descendants of significant coefficient and avoids encoding the children of each newly generated significant coefficient if it has no significant descendant.