Introduction to Data Compression

In this chapter we will use the generic term message for the objects we want to compress,

which could be either files or messages. The task of compression consists of two components, an

encoding algorithm that takes a message and generates a “compressed” representation (hopefully

with fewer bits), and a decoding algorithm that reconstructs the original message or some approximation

of it from the compressed representation. These two components are typically intricately

tied together since they both have to understand the shared compressed representation.