The lapped biorthogonal transform (LBT) based low complexity and low memory image compression method is proposed in this paper. LBT costs 46% computation as the discrete wavelet based (DWT), and only buffers 1/15 data that DWT does. By analyzing the distribution of the coefficients of LBT, the quantized set partition codec is used in our method. In coding process no context information is needed, and no complicated data structure, such as list, is used, which is low memory and low computation. The compression results on many standard test images show that, using the same coding method, LBT based one performs better than DWT based, with higher PSNR and less distortion. We also find that LBT based method is especially fit to images with more details, such as high resolution satellite images. After all, our method is suitable to portable devices and real time processing.