The evaluation of the suitability of image compression techniques to 3D PTV images is motivated by a conflict between the bandwidth of data transfer and storage systems and the requirements concerning spatial and temporal resolution of 3D PTV data. In this paper the possibilities of lossless compression are outlined and the influence of lossy JPEG and Wavelet algorithm to PTV particle images is displayed. It is shown that JPEG and Wavelet compression technique have almost the same impact to particle images; both techniques can be used up to a compression ratio of 10 in special cases up to 20. For the lossless case a compression ratio of 5 can be reached with image preprocessing.