A new wavelet-based joint source-channel image coding scheme was proposed. For each subband, the statistical variable-coefficient fixed-length (VCFL) coding algorithm was applied, then different rate-compatible punctured convolutional (RCPC) code was used before transmission to provide unequal error protection (UEP). Given the total transmission bits, an optimal algorithm was used to minimize the total distortion. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme has higher compression ratio and performs well on channels with high bit error rate(BER).