The Set Partitioning in Hierarchical Trees (SPIHT) approach for still image compression is one of the most efficient embedded gray image compression schemes till date. The algorithm relies on a very efficient scanning cum bit-allocation scheme for quantizing the coefficients obtained by a wavelet decomposition of an image. In this paper, modifications of the SPIHT compressor without arithmetic coding have been presented. The simulation result has shown that the algorithm is suitable for wireless communication due to less memory requirement, fast with almost equal compression performance of peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) compare to original SPIHT.