Because ordinary image compression algorithms and other compression methods based on Digital Signal Processors(DSPs) or PC machines can not satisfy the demands of high speed and small volume image compression applications,a low complexity image compression scheme based on the 5/3 Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is proposed in this paper.Firstly, the correlation redudancy of image is excluded with 3-level z-dimension DWT. Secondly, the DWT coefficients are quantized according to the conversion gain of wavelet subband and the predict of LL subband is quantized. Finally,the image compression by combining adaptive zero run-length coding with Exp-Golomb coding is realized based on the probability distribution. Experimental results show the scheme has advantages in low computational complexity and hardware implementation,while it maintains relatively high performance in compressing various images.Moreover,it offers a high speed image compression of 175 Mpixel/s by FPGA,which provides an algorithm base for developing high speed image compression devices.