Abstract: Methods and apparatuses for compressing digital image data are described herein. In one embodiment, a wavelet transform is performed on each pixel of a frame to generate multiple wavelet coefficients representing each pixel in a frequency domain. The wavelet coefficients of a sub-band of the frame are iteratively encoded into a bit stream based on a target transmission rate, where the sub-band of the frame is obtained from a parent sub-band of a previous iteration. The encoded wavelet coefficients satisfy a predetermined threshold based on a predetermined algorithm while the wavelet coefficients that do not satisfy the predetermined threshold are ignored in the respective iteration. Other methods and apparatuses are also described.