This paper focuses on presenting an efficient underwater acoustic communication system for image transmission. Water nature slows propagation speed down, and corrupts the transmitted signal. Moreover, the channel capacity is limited. The proposed system aims at effectively withstanding channel effects, minimizing the bit error rate and obtaining images with acceptable quality at the receiver. This system includes four parts; image source coding, channel coding, modulation scheme and image denoising. Set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) is used for efficient image compression. To detect transmission errors, reduce the decoder complexity and increase the efficiency of transmission, convolutional coding is employed. Quadrature amplitude modulation (4-QAM) is used with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) to provide a reliable spectrally efficient system and enhance its resistivity to channel effects. Differential coding is used with 4-QAM to handle phase errors, while avoiding complex carrier tracking. To improve the image quality, 2-D double-density dual-tree complex discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is used to denoise the received decompressed image. Simulation results show that the proposed system is capable of transmitting and receiving underwater images with acceptable quality.