In view of color image characteristic, the paper improves the zero algorithm in the application of concrete algorithm, draws a new algorithm-incomplete scanning method, which is applied to color image compression. The authorsconvert color image from the RGB space into luminance-chrominance YUV space, then compress the converted image to encode/decode. Theoretical analysis and simulation experiment indicate that the compression ratio and encoding/decoding speed are increased, at the sase time the quality of restored image is guaranteed.