Abstract: In the past few years there had been many research works on representation of an image as well as itsprocessing operations by quadtree.Wherein image translation is a quite interesting topic,but the algorithmsfor it are inefficient.An image translation algorithm based on quadtree is proposed in this paper.It has anunconventional grace of its own.By using"active edge"data structure to keep the information of"activeblocks",the algorithm requires neither"sorting"nor"searching"technique,and much time is thus saved.