Data compression is a great method for maximizing data storage space and making data communication faster. However, compression and decompression of binary data sometimes can be quite tricky. Learn a few useful data-compression techniques.
by Alex Kozak
September 29, 2006
inary data is natural for computers. Everything running on the computer's physical layer, in the registers, ALU, memory, and so on, is just a result of manipulating a set of 0's and 1's, where 0 and 1 are the logical representations of two different voltage levels. While very convenient for machine processing, base-two numeral systems have some drawbacks. For one, each binary digit can keep only two values: 0 or 1. That means large binary numbers will produce very long binary messages, which cause problems with data transfer, processing, and storage.
One solution to the problem of long binary messages is data encoding that shortens the original message—in another words, data compression. You can employ any number of compression algorithms to compress data, but what happens under the hood? Rather than discuss the fairly large number of compression algorithms out there, this article focuses on the technical aspects of data compression, namely binary data manipulations that can be useful for any compression algorithm.
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inary data is natural for computers. Everything running on the computer's physical layer, in the registers, ALU, memory, and so on, is just a result of manipulating a set of 0's and 1's, where 0 and 1 are the logical representations of two different voltage levels. While very convenient for machine processing, base-two numeral systems have some drawbacks. For one, each binary digit can keep only two values: 0 or 1. That means large binary numbers will produce very long binary messages, which cause problems with data transfer, processing, and storage.
