In this paper, we are interested in studying the impact of the compression on the performances of some wavelet-based retrieval systems. Firstly, we show that the quantization operation of JPEG2000 has a negative effect on the performance of these contentbased image retrieval systems for a given feature extraction method. Moreover, in this work, we aim at designing a novel retrieval strategy in order to reduce the performance drop resulting from quantizing the query and database images at different bitrates. More precisely, instead of directly comparing these images, we propose to perform the comparison step at similar qualities by re-compressing the high quality image at the bitrate of the low quality one. Experimental results corroborate the gain achieved by the proposed strategy.