This paper proposes a new method for the design of lifting filters to compute a multidimensional nonseparable wavelet transform. Our approach is stated in the general case, and is illustrated for the 2-D separable and for the quincunx images. Results are shown for the JPEG2000 database and for satellite images acquired on a quincunx sampling grid. The design of efficient quincunx filters is a difficult challenge which has already been addressed for specific cases. Our approach enables the design of less expensive filters adapted to the signal statistics to enhance the compression efficiency in a more general case. It is based on a two-step lifting scheme and joins the lifting theory with Wiener's optimization. The prediction step is designed in order to minimize the variance of the signal, and the update step is designed in order to minimize a reconstruction error. Application for lossy compression shows the performances of the method.