The standard separable two-dimensional (2-D) wavelet transform (WT) has recently achieved a great success in image processing because it provides a sparse representation of smooth images. However, it fails to capture efficiently one-dimensional (1-D) discontinuities, like edges and contours, that are anisotropic and characterized by geometrical regularity along different directions. In our previous work, we proposed a construction of critically sampled perfect reconstruction anisotropic transform with directional vanishing moments (DVM) imposed in the corresponding basis functions, called directionlets. Here, we show that the computational complexity of our transform is comparable to the complexity of the standard 2-D WT and substantially lower than the complexity of other similar approaches. We also present a zerotree-based image compression algorithm using directionlets that strongly outperforms the corresponding method based on the standard wavelets at low bit rates