The JPEG 2000 standard for still image compression provides rich set of features, including lossless and lossy compression, region of interest coding, and progressive transmission. JPEG 2000 provides lower bit rates at the same rate distortion and subjective quality levels as the older JPEG standards. The features were realized using two techniques namely the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), and Hardware architecture for the proposed process was developed, realized in VHDL, and synthesized for implementation on FPGA XILINX Spartan 3E.