The visual-characteristic-based compression technique breaks through the restriction of the traditional image compression technique that uses MSE as criterion

and combines the human visual characteristic with the coding arithmetic

in order to achieve the lowest bit rate and the best perceptual image quality. Now

much headway has been made in the research of this technique

but there still are many problems to be researched on. This paper systematically introduces the existing methods of this compression technique

and discusses some visual coding techniques that applied in JPEG-2000 and MPEG-4 standards. After researching on the techniques. Some results and conclusion are gaven as follow:perceptual measurement of the image quality

automatic ascertainment of the region-of-interest and recognition and segmentation of the arbitrary object are the main problems existing in the visual-characteristic-based coding technique

and they are also the research direction for the future.