This paper proposes a variable block size vector quantization based on a biorthogonal wavelet transform for image compression. An image is first decomposed with the biorthogonal wavelet transform into multiresolution image and the wavelet coefficients of the middle frequency bands are segmented using the quadtree sturcture to extract the perceptually important regions in the middle frequency bands. A sedges of middle frequency bands exist the corresponding position of high frequency bands, the complicated quadtree structure of middle frequency bands is equally applied to the high frequency bands. Therefore the overhaed information of the quadtree codes needed to segment the high frequency bands can be reduced. The segmented subblocks are encoded with the codebook designed at the each scales and directions. The simulation results showed that the proposed methods could reproduce higher quality image with bit rate reduced about 20(%) than of the preceding VQ method and sufficiently reduce the bolck effect and the edge degradation.