In this paper, we propose two enhanced elements on the wavelet-based contourlet transform (WBCT) image coding scheme. A short-length 2-D non-separable directional filter bank is designed for significantly reducing the calculation. New zero coding context models are designed to improve coding efficiency. Experiments show that the proposed compression scheme produces better visual quality images, particularly, with fine and regular texture at low rates. The short-length directional filter bank performs nearly as well as their long-length counterpart.