Lossless Compression Handbook

Preface

Compression schemes can be divided into two major classes: lossless compression schemes

and lossy compression schemes. Data compressed using lossless compression schemes can

be recovered exactly, while lossy compression introduces some loss of information in the

reconstruction.

While the first modern compression scheme, Huffman coding, was a lossless compression

scheme, most of the initial activity in the compression area focused on lossy compression. One

reason was that the "data" being considered for compression was analognprimarily samples

of speech waveforms. Another reason was that the device ...