1. A method for determining a marking material usage estimate for a print job to be performed by a printing system, the method is implemented in a computer system comprising one or more processors configured to execute one or more computer program modules, the method comprising: receiving wavelet compressed data of an image of the print job, wherein the image having a plurality of image pixels each having an image pixel intensity value and wherein the image pixels are transformed into the wavelet compressed data using a wavelet compression scheme; obtaining marking material usage statistics for the wavelet compressed data by partially decompressing the wavelet compressed data so as to obtain average pixel intensity values of the image pixels in the image; and determining the marking material usage estimate for the print job using the obtained marking material usage statistics, wherein the wavelet compressed data includes an overlapping sequence of planes, each representing a higher spatial frequency, wherein the overlapping sequence of planes includes a lowest spatial frequency plane and remaining spatial frequency planes, wherein the lowest spatial frequency plane represents the average of the remaining, overlapping sequence of planes, and wherein the obtaining the marking material usage statistics for the wavelet compressed data comprises partially decompressing the wavelet compressed data to obtain a sum of pixel intensity values in the lowest spatial frequency plane.