Overview
In information theory, data compression, source coding
Lossless
Lossless data compression algorithms usually exploit statistical redundancy to represent data without losing any information
Lossy
In the late 1980s, digital images became more common, and standards for lossless image compression emerged. In the early 1990s
Uses
Entropy coding originated in the 1940s with the introduction of Shannon–Fano coding, the basis for Huffman coding which was developed in 1950
Outlook and currently unused potential
It is estimated that the total amount of data that is stored on the world's storage devices could be further compressed with existing compression
In information theory, data compression, source coding, or
bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compression reduces bits by identifying and eliminating statistical redundancy.Information theory is defined to be the study of efficient coding and its consequences, in the form of speed of transmission and probability of error [Ingels 1971]. Data compression may be viewed as a branch of information theory in which the primary objective is to
minimize the amount of data to be transmitted.Compression reduces the cost of storage, increases the speed of algorithms, and reduces the transmission cost. Compression is achieved by
removing redundancy, that is repetition of unnecessary data.
Data compression, also called compaction, the process of reducing the amount of data needed for the storage or transmission of a given piece of information, typically by the use of encoding techniques.
In information theory, redundancy measures the fractional difference between the entropy texhtml mvar style=font-style:italic>H(X) of an ensemble texhtml mvar style=font-style:italic>X, and its maximum possible value mwe-math-element>.
Informally, it is the amount of wasted space used to transmit certain data.
Data compression is a way to reduce or eliminate unwanted redundancy, while forward error correction is a way of adding desired redundancy for purposes of error detection and correction when communicating over a noisy channel of limited capacity.