After a boom that coincided with the advent of the internet, digital cameras, digital video and audio storage and playback devices, the research on data compression has rested on its laurels for a quarter of a century. Domain-dependent lossy algorithms of the time, such as JPEG, AVC, MP3 and others, achieved remarkable compression ratios and encoding and decoding speeds with acceptable data quality, which has kept them in common use to this day. However, recent computing paradigms such as cloud computing, edge computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and digital preservation have gradually posed new challenges, and, as a consequence, development trends in data compression are focusing on concepts that were not previously in the spotlight. In this article, we try to critically evaluate the most prominent of these trends and to explore their parallels, complementarities, and differences. Digital data restoration mimics the human ability to omit memorising information that is satisfactorily retrievable from the context. Feature-based data compression introduces a two-level data representation with higher-level semantic features and with residuals that correct the feature-restored (predicted) data. The integration of the advantages of individual domain-specific data compression methods into a general approach is also challenging. To the best of our knowledge, a method that addresses all these trends does not exist yet. Our methodology, COMPROMISE, has been developed exactly to make as many solutions to these challenges as possible inter-operable. It incorporates features and digital restoration. Furthermore, it is largely domain-independent (general), asymmetric, and universal. The latter refers to the ability to compress data in a common framework in a lossy, lossless, and near-lossless mode. COMPROMISE may also be considered an umbrella that links many existing domain-dependent and independent methods, supports hybrid lossless-lossy techniques, and encourages the development of new data compression algorithms.

• Klíčová slova
• data compression, data restoration, feature, residual, universal algorithm,
• Publikační typ
• časopisecké články MeSH

Data compression algorithms tend to reduce information entropy, which is crucial, especially in the case of images, as they are data intensive. In this regard, lossless image data compression is especially challenging. Many popular lossless compression methods incorporate predictions and various types of pixel transformations, in order to reduce the information entropy of an image. In this paper, a block optimisation programming framework Φ is introduced to support various experiments on raster images, divided into blocks of pixels. Eleven methods were implemented within Φ , including prediction methods, string transformation methods, and inverse distance weighting, as a representative of interpolation methods. Thirty-two different greyscale raster images with varying resolutions and contents were used in the experiments. It was shown that Φ reduces information entropy better than the popular JPEG LS and CALIC predictors. The additional information associated with each block in Φ is then evaluated. It was confirmed that, despite this additional cost, the estimated size in bytes is smaller in comparison to the sizes achieved by the JPEG LS and CALIC predictors.

• Klíčová slova
• Computer science, Information entropy, Inverse distance transform, Prediction, String transformations,
• Publikační typ
• časopisecké články MeSH