Two fractal-based compression procedures are investigated and compared with the conventional JPEG procedure for remotely sensed images. All three algorithms are applied to two panchromatic subscenes from SPOT. The performances are evaluated with the indices including entropy, correlation coefficient, root mean square error, pixel value differences, and signal noise ratio, which are computed from the differences between the compressed and the original images. The results indicate that fractal compression methods provide higher potential compression ratio. In general, when the compression ratio is larger than 50, fractal-based approaches have better performance than JPEG. Regarding feature analysis, edges of large and homogeneous areas can be recognized easier..