Abstract: In this paper, a new multiple description image coding scheme based on directional lifting wavelet transform is proposed, which can avoid the serious quality degradation of compressed images in the Internet or wireless environment due to the packet error or packet loss. The basic idea is to divide an image into two descriptions with quincunx down-sampling. To tackle the problem of low coding efficiency in the traditional spatial domain multiple description image coding techniques, we propose a directional lifting technique to extensively exploit the correlations among neighboring pixels, in which the lifting directions are selected and organized based on the quad-tree partition. A novel interpolation scheme is employed in the side decoder to reconstruct one description with full resolution. The data fusion algorithm is employed in the central decoder to reconstruct the whole image, which can further improve the quality of the reconstructed image.