1. A computer-readable medium not consisting of a propagated data signal, said computer readable storage medium being encoded with computer executable instructions which, when executed by a processor, perform a method of storing an image in a compressed format, the method comprising: a. creating a base texture from a rectangular initial texture, the base texture including a plurality of texel sub-blocks, the base texture having a resolution that is fractionally smaller than that of the initial texture in both width and height and including a plurality of elements, each element in the base texture storing a linear offset; b. for each texel sub-block, losslessly constructing a corresponding wavelet tree through hierarchical sub-band decomposition in which a hierarchical multi-scale representation of the texel-sub blocks is utilized so that parent nodes in the wavelet tree have a coarser scale compared with any child nodes in the wavelet tree, and each element in the base texture further storing a base scale applicable to the constructed wavelet tree; c. pruning each wavelet tree; d. quantizing each wavelet tree; and e. sequentially writing each wavelet tree breadth first into a single line texture, each linear offset pointing to a position of a corresponding wavelet tree within the line texture.