A method of encoding an input video signal for communication over a computer network, the method comprising the steps of: i) applying a three-dimensional wavelet-based temporal and spatial decomposition to produce a plurality of spatio-temporal subbands; ii) quantizing the coefficients of the spatio-temporal subbands with a uniform scalar quantizer to produce a significance map; and iii) run-length and adaptive arithmetic coding of the signal by encoding the significance map, encoding the signs of all significant coefficients, and encoding the magnitudes of significant coefficients, in bit-plane order starting with the most significant bit-plane.
