An image coding scheme based on the wavelet transform and lattice vector quantization (LVQ) for transmission over CDMA channels will be presented. For the purpose of providing reliable transmission, a joint source-channel coding method - rate compatible convolutional coding (RCPC) - is used for channels which have Rayleigh fading effects to protect the coded bitstream from the noise of CDMA channels. Three different kinds of wavelets - Daubechies, biorthogonal and B-spline wavelets - were used for the source coding of images, and the statistics of subband coefficients of these wavelet transformed images was analysed. For the CDMA channel model, multipath Rayleigh fading effects and the multiple access interference (MAI) were considered, and two different receivers were used to see their performance in handling those different types of interference. One is the Rake receiver used together with RCPC for channels having Rayleigh fading effects as well as MAI. Another is a recursive-least-square (RLS) minimum-mean-square-error (MMSE) receiver, which is based on the theory of blind multiuser detection, to be used for the cases of fixed CDMA wireless applications which do not have Rayleigh fading effects but still have MAI. The overall performance of the coding scheme based on Daubechies, biorthogonal and B-spline wavelets respectively is also shown.