In this paper, a novel image transmission scheme for the transmission of SPIHT image coding streams over the binary symmetric channel (BSC) is proposed. The main idea behind this scheme is that the output of the SPIHT image coding will be sent related to its significant information. The modified SPIHT coder will generate three groups of bitstream. The significant bits, the sign bits, and the refinement bits are transmitted in three different groups. The optimal unequal error protection (UEP) of these groups is proposed. The RS codes and the RCPC codes are used to test the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in each case. The simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme provides significantly better PSNR performance in comparison to well-known robust coding schemes.