Certain aspects of the present disclosure relate to techniques for low-complexity encoding (compression) of broad class of signals, which are typically not well modeled as sparse signals in either time-domain or frequency-domain. First, the signal can be split in time-segments that may be either sparse in time domain or sparse in frequency domain, for example by using absolute second order differential operator on the input signal. Next, different encoding strategies can be applied for each of these time-segments depending in which domain the sparsity is present.