Abstract: Quality assessment for remote sensing image compression is of great value in many realms.However,there has no quality assessment scenarios in the field of surveying and mapping.This paper suggested that remote sensing image quality assessment experiments centering on subjective assessment and objective assessment should be taken according to application requirements.The experiments show that the compression ratio should be no more than 4∶1 if the improved SPIHT algorithm were employed on board for Resources Satellite 3.