In this paper, we present a pipeline architecture specifically designed to process and compress DNA microarray images. Many of the pixilated image generation methods produce one row of the image at a time. This property is fully exploited by the proposed pipeline that takes in one row of the produced image at each clock pulse and performs the necessary image processing steps on it. This will remove the present need for sluggish software routines that are considered a major bottleneck in the microarray technology. Moreover, two different structures are proposed for compressing DNA microarray images. The proposed architecture is proved to be highly modular, scalable, and suited for a standard cell VLSI implementation.