Miniature cameras have become an integral feature of todays' networked multimedia consumer products. The ever increasing demand for low cost ultracompact multimedia products is behind a growing effort towards integrating the different circuit components of a camera system onto a single-chip. Such an integration has become possible using microelectronics industry standard CMOS fabrication process, which enables the fabrication of a CMOS pixel array together with image processing circuitry. This thesis investigates the challenges of integrating the image compression block into a CMOS camera. The direct implementation of standard image compression algorithms like JPEG would result in prohibitively large power and silicon area budgets because image compression standards like JPEG are computationally and resource intensive. v Table of Contents vii List of Figures xi List of Tables xv List of Tables 3.1 Average performance of 20 test images from scientific image database