Data Compression

Why is data compression so important

Television quality video requires approximately 100 G Bytes for each hour or about 27 M bytes for each second. Such data and rates severely stress storage systems and networks that make even the most even the most trivial real-time processing impossible without special purpose hardware. Data compression requires the identification of the source of redundancy. In other words data compression seeks to reduce the number of bits used to store or transmit information.

There are two main type of data compression lossless and lossy compression. Lossless compression can recover the exact original data after decompression. It is used mainly for compressing databases records, spreadsheets or word processing files, where an exact replica of the original is essential. On the other hand lossy compression will result in a certain loss of accuracy in exchange or a substantial increase in compression. Lossy compression is more effective when used...