A method and apparatus for accelerating the conversion and detecting image data in pixel format into bit-plane format and bit plane format to pixel format for JPEG2000 compression and decompression is disclosed. In one embodiment, a method for encoding coefficients comprises applying one or more wavelet transforms to generate multiple coefficients, converting the pixel coefficients into bit-plane format and detecting zero bit-planes. This causes the image data in pixel to be broken into bit planes and stored in memory. If all the bits in a selected pixel plane are zero, an indication is stored in an N bit memory array corresponding to the N bit planes of the pixel code block that is processed. The indicator bits are useful in speeding up further compression.