Methods and systems for compressing a continuous data flow for numerous applications where it is necessary to process large data sets such as hyper-spectral data cubes in real-time. A predetermined number of 2D focal plane frames in a boundary area of a previous regional data cube close to a current regional data cube are included in a training set used for codevector training for the current region. Therefore, no artificial boundary occurs between the two adjacent regions when codevectors trained in this way are used for codebook generation and encoding of the spectral vectors of the current regional data cube. This process substantially reduces image artifacts between adjacent regions. A remedy for the single bit error problem is also provided. Full redundancy of compressed data for a regional data cube is obtained by combining a previous regional data cube and the current regional data cube for codebook training. In order to obtain redundancy for the index map, the codebook is used to encode the current regional data cube as well as the previous regional data cube producing a baseline index map for the current regional data cube and a redundant index map for the previous regional data cube. Therefore, full redundancy for a regional data cube is provided allowing restoration of a regional data cube even if its codebook and/or index map are corrupted or lost due to single bit errors.