The coding methods suitable for bandwidth compression of multispectral imagery are considered. These methods are compared using various criteria of optimality such as MSE,signal-to-noise ratio, recognition accuracy, as well as computational complexity. Based on these results the candidate methods are reduced to three recommended methods. These are KL-2 Dimensional DPCM, KL-cosine-DPCM and a cluster coding method. The performance of the recommended methods are examined in the presence of a noisy channel and concatenated with a variable rate (Huffman) encoder.