To solve the problem of the store and transmission of vast DEM data, an efficient compression algorithm for DEM data is presented. A technique based on the lifting scheme is designed to construct the compactly supported wavelets whose coefficients are composed of free variables. By properly selecting the coefficients of the 9-7 wavelet filter and being associated with the lifting scheme, an efficient approach via wavelet for DEM data compression is developed. The integer wavelets based on the lifting scheme only used integral addition, integral multiplication and shift, so it can be fast and easily realized via the hardware. When t=1, the integral wavelet filters approximately have the same complexity as integer wavelets 5-3, but preserve approximate quality of the compressed DEM data with the well-known CDF9-7 wavelet filters. The experiments show that the method can compress DEM data very well. Provided that the terrain figure and hypsography are maintained, the DEM data's compression ratio is 4096 and PSNR>34DB.