A novel Bacterial Foraging Algorithm (BFA) based neural network is presented for image compression. To improve the quality of the decompressed images, the concepts of reproduction, elimination and dispersal in BFA are firstly introduced into neural network in the proposed algorithm. Extensive experiments are conducted on standard testing images and the results show that the pro- posed method can improve the quality of the reconstructed images significantly. To improve the quality of the decompressed images, the concepts of reproduction, elimination and dispersal in BFA are resolved introduced into neural network in the proposed algorithm. Extensive experiments are conducted on standard testing images and the results show that the pro- posed method can improve the quality of the reconstructed images significantly.