Abstract A simple and efficient method to design adaptive prefilters based on minimizing the high pass energy of the signal multiwavelet decomposition is presented in this paper. This method can be generalized to 2-dimensional images by processing rows and columns respectively. In this way adaptive prefiltering can be performed for images so that the reconstructed image quality is greatly improved. The experimental result shows that the adaptive prefilter given in this paper is superior to the other prefilters available.