Uniformly quantized wavelet coefficients are first partitioned into multiscale blocks. Each block is classified either as an all-zero block or a non-zero block. A new method called zero mapping is proposed to en- code all the non-zero blocks, whose output is further compressed by a first order adaptive arithmetic coder. With very low addressing and computational complexity, the proposed algorithm compares favorably with other coding algorithms reported in the literature, especially for images with considerable high frequency components.