Mathematical Preliminaries for Lossless Compression

2.1 Overview

The treatment of data compression in this book is not very mathematical. (For a more mathematical treatment of some of the topics covered in this book, see [36].) However, we do need some mathematical preliminaries to appreciate the compression techniques we will discuss. Compression schemes can be divided into two classes, lossy and lossless. Lossy compression schemes involve the loss of some information, and data that have been compressed using a lossy scheme generally cannot be recovered exactly. Lossless schemes compress the data without loss of information, and the original data can be recovered exactly from the compressed data. In this chapter, some of the ideas in information ...

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