A raster to block converter and equivalently a block to raster converter can be implemented using enough memory to contain a single image band, that is a band of pixels of height equal to a single block but spanning the entire width of an image. The raster to block converter can operate at full rate so that as soon as a pixel is read out from the memory a new pixel can be stored in its place. The location of a pixel can be tracked using a mapping involving basic modular arithmetic. This raster to block converter is scalable so that it can work with any size image and block size.