1. The reduction of information to be transmitted in a still picture, a frame of a video sequence, or a motion-zerotree frame, by performing vector quantization on the data using line-vectors, noting each line-vector's center positional offset with respect to the current zerotree node as measured along the length of the line vector, where similarity in the image or motion-field from line to line in a subband, along the direction of line vectors would enable efficient, compact encoding.