Virtual terrain environments have been used widely, and high-resolution texture images are of the foundation for visualization. Huge amount of data caused by the improvements on image resolution leads to the restriction of reading and storage which can influence the visualization system, data compression is an efficient means for boosting the system performance. When an aircraft is flying through a mountainous terrain at a high speed and low altitude under the condition of poor visibility, the manipulator usually gets disoriented where danger is likely to happen. The virtual terrain environment can provide the manipulator with a broad vision of the visual three-dimension geographical environment which keeps the visualization of terrain under special conditions. Based on the wavelet coefficients after lifting scheme, we firstly take the advantages of energy concentration on low-frequency sub-bands and relativity between sub-bands, then organize those coefficients across sub-bands and vectorize them, and again use one of the texture compression algorithm-vector quantization coding-for coefficients compression. This scheme is propitious for the real-time requirement in flight because of the high compression ratio, non-symmetrical coding and fast decoding speed.