In the long process of human evolution and development,every day,the human visual system deals with a lot of visual information. For its own survival and development,the human beings have to evolve a powerful imageprocessing capability,such as image coding of the visual system,etc. Sparse coding successfully simulats the strong ability of image coding of the primary visual cortex in mammals’ visual systems such as human,which features selfadaptability,and the learned image base are localized,oriented in space domain and bandpass in the frequency domain. Nonnegative sparse coding developes and evolves on the basis of sparse coding,to overcome the interoffset phenomena of characteristics,and the coding performance is more superior. And the nonnegative sparse coding,which joins the image structure information using the experience modality decomposition technology,reflects the structural characteristics of the image better in addition to ensuring the characteristics of nonnegative sparse coding. An image coding approach based on the image base is presented in this paper,and the improved nonnegative sparse coding algorithm is used in image compression,and an ideal compression ratio in ensuring a better quality of the decoded images is achieved.