Data Compression Term paper

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‘Data Compression’ just sounds complicated. 

Don’t be

afraid, compression is our good friend

for many reasons.  It saves hard drive

space.  It makes data files to handle. 

It also cuts those immense file download

times from the Internet.  Wouldn’t

it be nice if we could compress all files

down to just a few bytes?

 There is a limit to how much you

can compress

a file.  How  random the file

is, is the determining factor to how far it can

be compressed.  If the file is completely

random and no pattern can be found,

then the shortest representation of the

file is the file it self.  The actual

proof that proves this is at the end of

my paper.  The key to compressing a

file is to find some sort of exploitable

pattern.  Most of this paper will

be explaining those patterns that are

commonly used.

 Null suppression is

the most primitive form of data compression

that I could find.  Basically,

it says that if you have different fields

that data is in (possibly a spread

sheet), and any of them have only zeros

in them, then the program just eliminates

the data and goes straight from the empty

data set to the next.

 Only one

step up from null suppression is Run Length

Encoding.  Run length encoding

simply tells you how many of what you

have in a row.  It would change a set

of binary data like {0011100001} into

what the computer reads as (2)zeros,

(3)ones, (4)zeros, 1.  As you can

see, it works on the same basic idea of finding

a series of 0’s (null suppression) and

1’s in this case too and abbreviating

them.

 Once the whole idea of data compression

caught on, more people started

working on programs for it.  From

these people we got some new premises to

work with.  Substitutional encoding

is a big one.  It was invented jointly

by two people: Abraham Lempel and Jakob

Ziv.  Most compression algorithms (big

word meaning roughly ‘program’) using

substitutional encoding start with ‘LZ’

for Lempel-Ziv.

 LZ-77 is a really neat compression

in which the program

starts off just copying the source file

over to the new target  file, but when

it recognizes a phrase of data that it

has previously written, it replaces

the second set of data in the target file

with directions on how to get to

the first occurrence of it and copy it

in the directions’ place.  This is more

commonly called a sliding-window compression

because the focus of the program

is always sliding all around the file.

 LZ-78 is the compression that most

people have in their homes.  Some

of the more common ones are ZIP, LHA, ARJ,

ZOO, and GZIP.  The main idea behind

LZ-78 is a ‘dictionary’.  Yet it works

quite a bit like the LZ-77.  For

every phrase it comes across, it indexes the

string by a number and writes it in a

‘dictionary’.  When the program comes

across the same string, it uses the associated

number in the ‘dictionary’ instead

of the string.  The ‘dictionary’

is then written along side the compressed

file to be used in decoding.

 There is a combined version of LZ-77

an

LZ-78.  It is called LZFG. 

It only writes to the dictionary when it finds

the repeated phrase, not on every phrase. 

Then instead of LZFG replacing the

second set of data with directions on

how to get to the first occurrence of

it, the program puts in the number reference

for the dictionary’s translation.

 Not only is it faster, but it compresses

better because of the fact that it

doesn’t have as big of a dictionary attached.

 Statistical encoding is another

one of the new compression concepts. 

It is an offshoot of the LZ family of

compressors; It uses basically the same

style as LZFG, but instead of assigning

the numbers in order that the strings

come out of the source file, statistical

compressors do some research.  It

calculates the number of times each string

is used and then ranks the string with

the most number of uses at the top of

the hash table.  The string with

the least is ranked at the bottom.  (A hash

table is where the rank is figured) 

The higher up a string is on this list,

the smaller of a reference number it gets

to minimize the total bit usage.

 This gives this compression just

a slight edge on the others, but every little

bit helps.  (ha ha -bit- )

 Beware!  There are a few compression

programs

out there that claim wonderful compression

ratios; ratios that beat the compression

limit for that file’s randomness. 

These programs aren’t really compression

programs.  They are OWS and WIC. 

Never compress anything with these.  What

they do is split up the file that you

desired to compress and...

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