An image coding mechanism is disclosed. The mechanism includes determining a region of interest in an image. The image is partitioned into a plurality of blocks. A transform is applied to the blocks to obtain a plurality of coefficients. The coefficients are assigned into quality layers of decreasing priority. Each subsequent layer includes data to incrementally increase quality of a reconstructed image. Region of interest coefficients are positioned in one or more image data packets by quality layer in order of decreasing priority. Remaining coefficients are positioned in the image data packets with a lower priority than the region of interest coefficients. The remaining coefficients are positioned by quality layer in order of decreasing priority. The image data packets are stored and transmitted over a network.