Abstract: To meet the requirement of various resolution displays on mobile terminals, an improved set portion in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) image coding algorithm is proposed, which integrates the seam carving (SC) technique. In the presented method, to generate spatial scalable bit stream, a new structure of spatial orientation tree (SOT) based on root nodes is constructed and the SC is used as a guide for SPIHT coding procedure. Mobile receivers can be capable of finishing the compression decoding and image resizing simultaneously only requiring the corresponding bit stream by using the proposed algorithm. Experimental results show that when the target resolution of receiver is the same as the original resolution, the average rate-distortion (R-D) performance of the proposed method is much close to that of the traditional SPIHT coding algorithm. While the target resolutions are lower than the original resolution, the proposed algorithm is superior to the traditional SPIHT coding approach whatever for coding bit rates or subjective quality of reconstructed images.