With much richer information than multispectral image, hyperspectral image has been applied in many aspects such as agriculture, environment, military etc. But higher spectral resolution is accompanied by a huge volume of image data, which will result in excessive computing time and data complexity for transmission and storage, so it is necessary to compress hyperspectral image. Because of limit of spatial resolution, some targets that we are interested in are usually in small size and belong to high frequency. In order to preserve such information as much as possible, a hierarchical compression method with protection strategy for hyperspectral image is proposed in this paper, which can protect information of interest (IOI) to some extent, including spatial and spectral IOI. The experimental results show that under the same compression rate, the proposed method can achieve better performance in target detection application than typical SPIHT method.