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Data compression

In signal processing, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction involves encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Compression can be either lossy or lossless. Lossless compression reduces bits by identifying and eliminating statistical redundancy. No information is lost in lossless compression. Lossy compression reduces bits by removing unnecessary or less important information. In signal processing, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction involves encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Compression can be either lossy or lossless. Lossless compression reduces bits by identifying and eliminating statistical redundancy. No information is lost in lossless compression. Lossy compression reduces bits by removing unnecessary or less important information. The process of reducing the size of a data file is often referred to as data compression. In the context of data transmission, it is called source coding; encoding done at the source of the data before it is stored or transmitted. Source coding should not be confused with channel coding, for error detection and correction or line coding, the means for mapping data onto a signal. Compression is useful because it reduces resources required to store and transmit data. Computational resources are consumed in the compression process and, usually, in the reversal of the process (decompression). Data compression is subject to a space–time complexity trade-off. For instance, a compression scheme for video may require expensive hardware for the video to be decompressed fast enough to be viewed as it is being decompressed, and the option to decompress the video in full before watching it may be inconvenient or require additional storage. The design of data compression schemes involves trade-offs among various factors, including the degree of compression, the amount of distortion introduced (when using lossy data compression), and the computational resources required to compress and decompress the data. Lossless data compression algorithms usually exploit statistical redundancy to represent data without losing any information, so that the process is reversible. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data exhibits statistical redundancy. For example, an image may have areas of color that do not change over several pixels; instead of coding 'red pixel, red pixel, ...' the data may be encoded as '279 red pixels'. This is a basic example of run-length encoding; there are many schemes to reduce file size by eliminating redundancy. The Lempel–Ziv (LZ) compression methods are among the most popular algorithms for lossless storage. DEFLATE is a variation on LZ optimized for decompression speed and compression ratio, but compression can be slow. In the mid-1980s, following work by Terry Welch, the Lempel–Ziv–Welch (LZW) algorithm rapidly became the method of choice for most general-purpose compression systems. LZW is used in GIF images, programs such as PKZIP, and hardware devices such as modems. LZ methods use a table-based compression model where table entries are substituted for repeated strings of data. For most LZ methods, this table is generated dynamically from earlier data in the input. The table itself is often Huffman encoded. Grammar-based codes like this can compress highly repetitive input extremely effectively, for instance, a biological data collection of the same or closely related species, a huge versioned document collection, internet archival, etc. The basic task of grammar-based codes is constructing a context-free grammar deriving a single string. Other practical grammar compression algorithms include Sequitur and Re-Pair. The strongest modern lossless compressors use probabilistic models, such as prediction by partial matching. The Burrows–Wheeler transform can also be viewed as an indirect form of statistical modelling. In a further refinement of the direct use of probabilistic modelling, statistical estimates can be coupled to an algorithm called arithmetic coding. Arithmetic coding is a more modern coding technique that uses the mathematical calculations of a finite-state machine to produce a string of encoded bits from a series of input data symbols. It can achieve superior compression compared to other techniques such as the better-known Huffman algorithm. It uses an internal memory state to avoid the need to perform a one-to-one mapping of individual input symbols to distinct representations that use an integer number of bits, and it clears out the internal memory only after encoding the entire string of data symbols. Arithmetic coding applies especially well to adaptive data compression tasks where the statistics vary and are context-dependent, as it can be easily coupled with an adaptive model of the probability distribution of the input data. An early example of the use of arithmetic coding was in an optional (but not widely used) feature of the JPEG image coding standard. It has since been applied in various other designs including H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and HEVC for video coding. In the late 1980s, digital images became more common, and standards for lossless image compression emerged. In the early 1990s, lossy compression methods began to be widely used. In these schemes, some loss of information is accepted as dropping nonessential detail can save storage space. There is a corresponding trade-off between preserving information and reducing size. Lossy data compression schemes are designed by research on how people perceive the data in question. For example, the human eye is more sensitive to subtle variations in luminance than it is to the variations in color. JPEG image compression works in part by rounding off nonessential bits of information. A number of popular compression formats exploit these perceptual differences, including psychoacoustics for sound, and psychovisuals for images and video. Most forms of lossy compression are based on transform coding, especially discrete cosine transform (DCT), which was introduced by Nasir Ahmed, T. Natarajan and K. R. Rao in 1974. DCT is the most widely used lossy compression method, and is used in multimedia formats for images (such as JPEG and HEIF), video (such as MPEG, AVC and HEVC) and audio (such as MP3, AAC and Vorbis). Lossy image compression is used in digital cameras, to increase storage capacities. Similarly, DVDs, Blu-ray and streaming video use the lossy video coding format.

[ "Computer vision", "Statistics", "Artificial intelligence", "Compression (physics)", "Algorithm", "Multiview Video Coding", "Transform coding", "Context tree weighting", "National Imagery Transmission Format", "Huffman coding" ]
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