The recent MPEG 4 and JPEG 2000 standards address the need for content based coding and manipulation of visual media. The upcoming MPEG 7 standard proposes content descriptors, which succinctly describe the visual content for the purpose of efficient retrieval. This implies that there is an impending need for efficient and effective joint compression and indexing approaches. Several compressed domain indexing techniques have been presented in the recent literature. These are based on the extraction of features from the compression parameters to derive the indices. However, there is little work in the domain of exploring the use of these features to serve the purposes of both compression and indexing. In this paper, we propose a new technique for joint compression and indexing in the wavelet domain. We note that wavelet based compression is used in JPEG 2000 and (for texture coding) in MPEG 4. In the proposed technique, the wavelet decomposed image is first preprocessed to extract features which are then used for compressing the image as well as for deriving the indices. Extensive simulations have been performed in the JPEG 2000 compressed domain to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed technique.