This paper presents a new scalable and highly flexible color image coder based on a Matching Pursuit expansion. The Matching Pursuit algorithm provides an intrinsically progressive stream and the proposed coder allows us to reconstruct color information from the first bit received. In order to efficiently capture edges in natural images, the dictionary of atoms is built by translation, rotation and anisotropic refinement of a wavelet-like mother function. This dictionary is moreover invariant under shifts and isotropic scaling, thus leading to very simple spatial resizing operations. This flexibility and adaptivity of the MP coder makes it appropriate for asymmetric applications with heterogeneous end user terminals.