Abstract: Video data compression techniques reduce necessary storage size and communication channel bandwidth while maintaining acceptable fidelity. Vector quantization provides better overall data compression performance by coding vectors instead of scalars. The search algorithm and VLSI architecture for implementing it is herein disclosed, and such a search algorithm is useful for real-time image processing. The architecture employs a single processing element and external memory for storing the N constant value hyperplanes used in the search, where N is the number of codevectors. The design does not perform any multiplication operation using the constant value hyperplane tree search, since the tree search method is independent of any L.sub.q metric for q between one and infinity. Memory used by the design is significantly less than memory employed in existing architecture.