This paper presents a new method for color image compression coding by using correlation of color components combined with wavelet transform. In this method

one of the three color components of a color image is coded using wavelet transform zerotree coding

and the component is segmented into several non overlapping subregions in the same size. and the chromatism matrixs are figured out by the margin between the component and the other two components in each subregions

and then the correlation coefficients is ciphered out suing chromatism matrix analysis. Based on the calculated correlation coefficients

the coding for the other two components becomes the coding of correlation coefficients. During decoding

the component is first reconstructed using inverse quantization and wavelet inverse transform. Then according to this component and the reconstructed correlation coefficients

the other two components are calculated out. Finally the color image is reconstructed by the three color components. Experiment results show that this method is of high coding and decoding rates

and with quite good signal to noise ratio

compression rate and visual quality.