Progressive image transmission (PIT) is widely used in many applications, since it generates the successively improved reconstructions of an image. In spatial domain PIT systems, perfectly reconstructed images can be obtained at the final stage. However the intermediate images are not good and there is no data compression. In this paper, the authors present a new simple spatial domain progressive image transmission using modified Kohonen self-organizing feature map algorithm, which is called Kohonen vector quantizer (KVQ). To alleviate edge distortion a classification technique is applied to KVQ. Computer simulation results show that very good intermediate images can be obtained at reasonable bit rates using the PIT scheme introduced. >