Run-length algorithms
In this chapter, we consider a type of redundancy, as in Example 2.24, where a consecutive sequence of symbols can be identified, and introduce a class of simple but useful lossless compression algorithms called run-length algorithms or run-length encoding (RLE for short).
We first introduce the ideas and approaches of the run-length compression techniques. We then move on to show how the algorithm design techniques learnt in Chapter 1 can be applied to solve the compression problem.
3.1 Run-length
The consecutive recurrent symbols are usually called runs in a sequence of symbols. Hence the source data of interest is a sequence of symbols from an alphabet. The goal of the run-length algorithm is to identify the ...
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