A progressive image compression scheme is investigated using reversible integer discrete cosine transform (RDCT) which is derived from the matrix factorization theory. Previous techniques based on DCT suffer from bad performance in lossy image compression compared with wavelet image codec. And lossless compression methods such as IntDCT, I2I-DCT and so on could not compare with JPEG-LS or integer discrete wavelet transform (DWT) based codec. In this paper, lossy to lossless image compression can be implemented by our proposed scheme which consists of RDCT, coefficients reorganization, bit plane encoding, and reversible integer pre- and post-filters. Simulation results show that our method is competitive against JPEG-LS and JPEG2000 in lossless compression. Moreover, our method outperforms JPEG2000 (reversible 5/3 filter) for lossy compression, and the performance is even comparable with JPEG2000 which adopted irreversible 9/7 floating-point filter (9/7F filter).