The JPEG 2000 image compression standard is designed for a broad range of data compression applications. The discrete wavelet transformation (DWT), central to the signal analysis and important in the JPEG 2000, is quite susceptible to computer-induced errors. The errors can be spread to many output transform coefficients if the DWT is implemented by using lifting scheme. This paper proposes an efficient error tolerance scheme (ETS) to detect errors occurring in DWT. A pipeline-based DWT structure is also developed in this paper to speed up the error detection process. The proposed ETS design uses weighting sums of the DWT coefficients at the output compared with an equivalent check value derived from the input-data. With the proposed ETS design, the errors introduced at DWT can be effectively detected. Additionally, the results of error detection can be further analyzed and evaluated to show the capability of error tolerance. Some standard images are used as test samples to verify the feasibility of the proposed ETS design. Experimental results and comparisons show that the proposed ETS has good performance in error detection time and error tolerance capability.