The present invention includes an image processing system with several data compression processing units connected together with a communication bus. Each data compression processing unit includes a wavelet transform processing unit, a shared register file and an address computation processing unit. The wavelet transform processing unit decomposes data from one or more segments of an image into wavelets using a discrete wavelet transform. The shared register stores the intermediate wavelet coefficient computations. The address computation processing unit identifies addresses of wavelets to be decomposed by subsequent operation of the wavelet transform processing unit. The system also includes storage where the resultant wavelet coefficients from each segment may be stored. The present invention also includes methods of compressing image data using multiple processors where each processor operates on a segment of the image data.