Al Wegener, Samplify Systems LLC
May 12, 2006 (9:23 AM)
Compression is the science of making data representations smaller, in order to decrease the data's bandwidth and storage requirements. Compression applications are everywhere: in computers (WinZip and PKzip), digital still cameras (JPEG), video applications (MPEG), telephone modems (V42.bis), cellular telephones (RPE-LPC, Qualcomm QCELP, GSM/2), and in consumer audio players (MP3, WMA, Real) and video devices (DVD, HDTV). In all of these applications, the benefits of compression were instrumental in bringing new kinds of products and services to market.
Each of the aforementioned applications has adopted one or more compression techniques to reduce the number of bits needed to represent the particular data type. Each compression technique uses a priori knowledge of the statistics of the input data, and the desired quality of the decompressed data, to craft market-specific compression solutions.
