The work presented in this paper addresses the increasing demand of visual signal delivery to terminals with arbitrary resolutions, without heavy computational burden to the receiving end. In this paper, the principle of Seam Carving is incorporated into a wavelet codec (i.e., SPIHT). For each input image, block-based seam energy map is generated in the pixel domain and the curvelet transform is performed for the retargeted image. Different from the conventional wavelet-based coding schemes, curvelet coefficients here are grouped and encoded according to the resultant seam energy map. The bit stream is then transmitted in energy in descending order. At the decoder side, the end user has the ultimate choice for the spatial scalability without the need to examine the visual content; and an image with arbitrary aspect ratio can be reconstructed. The simulation result proved that the proposal technique give better results compared to wavelet based image compression.