These are three techniques which are emerging from the research community for improved quality or compression or even both.
Briefly, though Wavelets are a generalization of the Fourier Transforms. Vector quantisation is a generalization of the quantisation mechanism, and fractal is a generalization of an information free object based compression scheme.
All three are compute intensive, although there are many people working on codecs (hardware and software) and we will probably see some low cost high quality results soon.