Data compression

Abstract

Over the past few years, data compression has become intimately integrated with information available in digital form; text, documents, images, sound, and music are all compressed before storage on a digital medium. However, depending on whether one is storing text, a document, or an image, there are different requirements on the type of compression algorithm that can be used. This is directly related to issues about the amount of compression that can be achieved and the quality with which the compressed data can be uncompressed. In this chapter we introduce the techniques behind data compression, especially those that apply to text and image compression.