Wavelet transform coding (WTC) with vector quantization (VQ) has been shown to be efficient in the application of image compression. An adaptive vector quantization coding scheme with the Gold-Washing dynamic codebook-refining mechanism in the wavelet domain, called symmetric wavelet transform-based adaptive vector quantization (SWT-GW-AVQ), is proposed for still-image coding in this article. The experimental results show that the GW codebook-refining mechanism working in the wavelet domain rather than the spatial domain is very efficient, and the SWT-GW-AVQ coding scheme may improve the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of the reconstructed images with a lower encoding time.