In an embodiment, a compression unit is provided which may perform compression of images with low latency and relatively little hardware. Similarly, a decompression unit may be provided which may decompress the images with low latency and hardware. In an embodiment, the transmission of compressed coefficients may be performed using less than two passes through the list of coefficients. During the first pass, the most significant coefficients may be transmitted and other significance groups may be identified as linked lists. The linked lists may then be traverse to send the other significance groups. In an embodiment, a color space conversion may be made to permit filtering of fewer color components than might be possible in the source color space.