Techniques for compressing and decompressing images captured from viewpoints throughout an n-dimensional space. As opposed to conventional approaches, these techniques exploit image coherence over the entire n-dimensional space, providing quick access to images along arbitrary contiguous viewpoint paths during computer graphics applications. This is accomplished by combining a hierarchical data structure with a compression methodology. Such techniques provide for generating and arranging reference images and residual images into a spatial image hierarchy such as a binary tree structure. Images and residuals may be encoded using intra-image compression. A captured image is extracted via a sequence of image warping and addition operations.