Abstract: With characteristics of complicated texture and rich edges, remote sensing image is usually hard to achieve high compression ratio. Energy distribution among wavelet subbands at different orientations and scales was statisticed, then an adaptive quantization method for different wavelet subbands coefficients was proposed, in the method contrast sensitivity function(CSF) of human vision system(HVS) and energy distribution characteristic were both considered. The quantization method was applied to an existing embedded wavelet image coder and the compression results show that comparing with method without psychovisual quantization, this method gets better visual quality under the same compression ratio (only with little peak signal noise ratio(PSNR) degradation).