Abstract: There is disclosed herein a system for expanding a compressed image stored in memory as one and two dimensional huffman codes into an image comprised of pixel data corresponding the orginal colors and positons of pixels in the original, uncompressed image. The system is comprised of a four stage, data driven pipeline where each stage works in parallel with the other stages. The first stage contends for read cycles to access the codes, stores the codes so accessed and converts the words of code bits so accessed into individual codes for application to the second stage. The second stage converts the incoming codes into their corresponding run lengths by looking each code up in a look up table. The table stores data which is either the run length itself for one dimensional codes or is data from which the run length may be calculated by reference to the previous raster line. The third stage converts the run lengths into strings of pixel data of the proper length and pixel color.