Lossy transform compression of images is very successful and widespread. The JPEG standard uses the discrete cosine transform on blocks of the image and a bit allocation process that takes advantage of the uneven energy distribution in the transform domain. Suppose that multiple versions of the compressed image exist in a distributed environment, and several of them could be made available upon request. The classical approach would provide no improvement in the image quality if more than one version of the compressed image became available. In this paper, we propose a method, based on multiple description scalar quantizations, that yields decompressed image quality improving with the number of compressed versions available.