A method, a carrier medium, and an apparatus to process a plurality of ordered series of quantized coefficients of a block of an image to reduce the amount of data used to represent the image. The method includes establishing a breakpoint along the ordering of the series to define a first contiguous region and a second contiguous region, such that clusters of consecutive signals of non-zero values occur mostly in the first contiguous region. Establishing the breakpoint uses statistics calculated from at least a subset of the plurality, the statistics being of where, along the ordering of the plurality of the series, coefficients of any non-zero value occur in clusters of consecutive non-zero coefficients. For each series in the plurality, the signals in the first region are encoded using a first region encoding method, and the signals in the second region are encoded using a second region encoding method.