A Concise Introduction to Data Compression

Compressing data is an option naturally selected when faced with problems of high costs or restricted space. Written by a renowned expert in the field, this book offers readers a succinct, reader-friendly foundation to the chief approaches, methods and techniques currently employed in the field of data compression.

Part I presents the basic approaches to data compression and describes a few popular techniques and methods commonly used to compress data. The reader discovers essential concepts, such as variable-length and prefix codes, statistical distributions and run-length encoding. Part II then concentrates on advanced techniques, such as arithmetic coding, orthogonal transforms, subband transforms and the Burrows-Wheeler transform.