In order to solve the problem that the Very Large Scale Integration(VLSI) architecture of a Discrete Wavelet Transform(DWT) wastes a huge amount of hardware resources,a parallel VLSI architecture based on the DWT for JPEG2000 is proposed. The architecture introduces a (9,7) wavelet parallel filtering technique based on the time difference,so that the row processor and the column processor can process the signals in a parallel way. By using a 2×2 transforming module,several kinds of registers can be used to substitute a lot of medium transforming memories. Experimental results show that the proposed architecture can efficiently decrease the hardware complexity and can improve hardware utilization to 100% nearly under the tight critical path. The architecture has been implemented in a post-route VHDL,and can be used as a compact and independent IP core for Voyage Data Recorder(VDR) radar image acquisition cards.