ITC/USA 2007 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Third Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2007 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Real-time transmission of airborne images to a ground station is highly desirable in many telemetering applications. Such transmission is often through an error prone, time varying wireless channel, possibly under jamming conditions. Hence, a fast, efficient, scalable, and error resilient image compression scheme is vital to realize the full potential of airborne reconnaisance. JPEG2000, the current international standard for image compression, offers most of these features. However, the computational complexity of JPEG2000 limits its use in some applications. Thus, we present a scalable low complexity coder (SLCC) that possesses many desirable features of JPEG2000, yet having high throughput.