Two-dimensional discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for processing image is conventionally designed by line-based architectures, which are simple and have low complexity. However, they suffer from two main shortcomings - the memory required for storing intermediate data and the long latency of computing wavelet coefficients. This work presents a new block-based architecture for computing lifting-based 2-D DWT coefficients. This architecture yields a significantly lower buffer size. Additionally, the latency is reduced from N2 down to 3N as compared to the line-based architectures. The proposed architecture supports the JPEG2000 default filters and has been realized in ARM-based ALTERA EPXA10 Development Board at a frequency of 44.33 MHz.