A method for compressing light field data using variable block-size four-dimensional transform and bit-plane hexadeca-tree decomposition, the method including: partitioning a four-dimensional pixel data of a light field into four-dimensional blocks of independent fixed size; partitioning the four-dimensional blocks in a set of four-dimensional non-overlapping sub-blocks of different sizes according to a rate-distortion criterion; independently transforming the four-dimensional sub-blocks generated in the previous operation, using a four-dimensional transform; quantizing by bit-planes the sub-blocks transformed by the four-dimensional transform according to Rate-Distortion optimized hexadeca-tree structure; and encoding the four-dimensional quantized data generated through an arithmetic encoder to produce a compressed representation of the light field.