1. A method for compression of two-dimensional (2D) imagery data comprising the steps of: a) applying a wavelet transform to the imagery data in a first direction to obtain first direction wavelet transform coefficients; b) applying a local cosine transform (LCT) to the imagery data in a second direction orthogonal to the first direction to obtain a plurality Q of blocks of second direction LCT coefficients; and c) processing the wavelet transform coefficients and the Q blocks of LCT coefficients to obtain a 2D compressed image.