This paper presents low-cost, purpose optimized discrete wavelet transform-based image compressors for future spacecrafts and microsatellites. The hardware solution proposed here exploits a modified set partitioning in hierarchical trees algorithm and ensures that appropriate reconstructed image qualities can be achieved also for compression ratios over 100:1. Several implementations are presented varying the parallelism level and the tile size. Obtained results demonstrate that, using a parallel implementation operating on a 64 /spl times/ 64 size tile, a maximum data rate of about 18 Mpixels/s can be sustained. In this case, only 4500 slices and 24 BlockRAMs of a XILINX Virtex II device are required.