Abstract: Digital image compression is getting more and more attention. Utilizing the local fractal feature in coding has achevied good results, but the searching and matching in its virtual codebook caused great computotion complexity. In this paper, we propose a new fractal image coding method based on genetic algorithm,Compared with exhaustive searching algorithm, the range of search is only on the ordar of O(10^-2), so comptaution complexity is greatly reduced,the quality of decoded image is quite good. The effectiveness of our algorithm is proved by experimental results.