James A. Storer Computer Science Dept. Brandeis University Waltham, MA 02254 Data compression is the process of encoding a body of data to reduce stor age requirements. With Lossless compression, data can be decompressed to be identical to the original, whereas with lossy compression, decompressed data may be an acceptable approximation (according to some fidelity criterion) to the original. For example, with digitized video, it may only be necessary that the decompressed video look as good as the original to the human eye. The two primary functions of data compression are: Storage: The capacity of a storage device can be effectively increased with data compression software or hardware that compresses a body of data on its way to the storage device and decompress it when it is retrieved. Communications: The bandwidth of a digital communication link can be effectively increased by compressing data at the sending end and decom pressing data at the receiving end. Here it can be crucial that compression and decompression can be performed in real time.
This book presents exciting recent research on the compression of images and text. Part 1 presents the (lossy) image compression techniques of vector quantization, iterated transforms (fractal compression), and techniques that employ optical hardware. Part 2 presents the (lossless) text compression techniques of arithmetic coding, context modelling, and dictionary methods (LZ methods); this part of the book also addresses practical massively parallel architectures for text compression. Part 3 presents theoretical work in coding theory that has applications to both text and image compression.This book ends with an extensive bibliography of data compression papers and books which can serve as a valuable aid to researchers in the field. Points of Interest: Data compression is becoming a key factor in the digital storage of text, speech graphics, images, and video, digital communications, data bases, and supercomputing. This book addresses 'hot' data compression topics such as vector quantization, fractal compression, optical data compression hardware, massively parallel hardware, LZ methods, arithmetic coding. the contributors for this book are all accomplished researchers.
It offers extensive bibliography to aid researchers in the field.