Wavelets are capable of approximating images with sharp discontinuities but not good at the approximation of images with smooth contours. Hence contourlet transform was introduced. It produces an efficient multi resolution and directional decomposition of an image using a laplacian pyramidal decomposition and a directional filter bank. It has good approximation capability for smooth 2D signals. A nonredundant version of this transform, Wavelet Based Contourlet Transform (WBCT) is appropriate for image compression. In this work, the use of WBCT for the compression of palmprint database and its performance are evaluated. The experimental results show that this coding is competitive to the wavelet based compression technique and provides visually superior quality of reconstruction for the mentioned images.