In order to solve the problem that the transmission of surveillance video in cloud desktop environment will take up a large amount of network bandwidth, and the video data compression and transmission decompression program is complex, the picture quality is blurred, and the effect of SPICE accessing virtual machine is poor under the conditions of wireless and external network, a method of surveillance video data compression and transmission using SPICE protocol in cloud desktop environment is proposed. Firstly, the overall architecture of cloud desktop system is designed based on SPICE desktop virtual framework. Then, the MJPEG algorithm is used to compress the data, and the discrete wavelet transform is used to transmit the data, which will reduce the bandwidth of video data transmission and improve the transmission efficiency. Finally, the video frame is coded and transmitted by the client. The qemu-kvm server receives the coded data, decodes and restores it to the original frame, and then processes it at the back end. The experimental results show that the data compressed can greatly improve the transmission efficiency and the anti-jamming ability of video transmission, achieve the goal of accurate and efficient design, and further enhance the user’s overall experience of accessing virtual machines through SPICE.