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 Books


There are many books published in the data compression field. Since the data compression area can be categorized in several parts, like lossless and lossy compression, audio, image and video compression, text compression, universal compression and so on, there are a lot of compression books on the market, which treat only a special part of the whole compression field.
The list below is just a small selection of available books, and the comments reflect my personal opinion and are no general evaluation.
There are three books, which are my definite favourites, all of them are real classics! Number one is "
The Data Compression Book" by by Mark Nelson and Jean-loup Gailly. This book gives an excellent intoduction into the world of compression and contains lots of source code and examples for practical usage. It covers all important compression areas, and if someone is familiar with the encryption field, it can be compared to the book "Applied Cryptography" by Bruce Schneier in the encryption world. Book number two is named "Text Compression" by Timothy Bell, John Cleary and Ian Witten. This book is a little bit older (1990) and is more research orientated (not pure theoretical, other books are much more theoretical and this book is really understandable). Especially the adaptive modeling and the different PPM schemes (A, B, C) are well described.
The last book is named "
The Burrows-Wheeler Transform - Data Compression, Suffix Arrays, and Pattern Matching" and contains the most information of all books about the Burros-Wheeler transform.

 Publications


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Title

Description

The Burrows-Wheeler Transform - Data Compression, Suffix Arrays, and Pattern Matching

The Burrows-Wheeler Transform - Data Compression, Suffix Arrays, and Pattern Matching
 

Authors: Donald Adjeroh, Timothy Bell, Amar Mukherjee
Publisher: Springer, New York, Berlin, Heidelberg, United States of America, Germany, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-387-78908-8
Size: 352 pages
Price: 139.00 USD

The first book about the Burrows-Wheeler transform contains many information about the transformation itself and about the second stages including different entropy coders and suffix sorting. The section about the empirical distribution of the BWT output contains several interesting diagrams with probability distributions.
This book contains the most information about the Burros-Wheeler transform.

 

Text Compression

Text Compression

 

Authors: Timothy Bell, John Cleary and Ian Witten
Publisher: Prentice-Hall, Englewood, United States of America, 1990
ISBN: 0-13-911991-4
Size: 318 pages
Price: 57.00 USD

This book is the reference on lossless compression. The emphasis is set on text compression and language modeling. It contains several statistical studies on text compression and explains in detail the adaptive modeling and the different PPM schemes (A, B, C).
It belongs to my favourite books in the data compression world.

 

The Data Compression Book

The Data Compression Book

 

Authors: Mark Nelson and Jean-loup Gailly
Publisher: M&T Books, New York, United States of America, 2nd edition, 1995
ISBN: 1-55851-434-1
Size: 541 pages
Price: 39.95 USD

It explains very well the ideas and basics of data compression algorithms and gives a good categorizing of the compression area. It covers lossless and lossy algorithms, the modeling-coding paradigm and statistical and dictionary schemes and contains source code for algorithms in C.
It is one of my favourite books on this subject.

 

Data Compression: The Complete Reference

Data Compression: The Complete Reference

 

Author: David Salomon
Publisher: Springer, New York, Berlin, Heidelberg, United States of America, Germany, 2nd edition, 2000
ISBN: 0-387-95045-1
Size: 823 pages
Price: 59.95 USD

This book describes many different compression algorithms together with their benefits, disadvantages and common usages. The description is more briefly than deeply and it contains no source code but it is a good reference and give an wide overview on lossless and lossy compression.

 

Introduction to Data Compression

Introduction to Data Compression

 

Author: Khalid Sayood
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Burlington, United States of America, 2nd edition, 2000
ISBN: 1-55860-558-4
Size: 600 pages
Price: 78.65 USD

This book is intended as a text book used at a senior level for a course in data compression. It gives an introduction into the wide field of coding algorithms, both lossless and lossy, with mathematical and theoretical background information.

 

The Mathematical Theory of Communication

The Mathematical Theory of Communication

 

Author: Claude Shannon
Publisher: University of Illinois Press, United States of America, 1949
ISBN: 0-252-72546-8 (Reprint)
Size: 144 pages
Price: 34.95 USD

The book from 1949 (!!!) describes the mathematical theory of transmitting information from a transmitter to a receiver over a channel for discrete and continous data. In this book the word "bit" was used for the first time and Shannon was the first person, who had the idea of transmitting pictures, text and sounds in a digital way.

 

Adaptive Data Compression

Adaptive Data Compression

 

Author: Ross Williams
Publisher: Kluwer Books, Norwell, United States of America, 1991
ISBN: 0-7923-9085-7
Size: 382 pages
Price: 210.00 USD

The book gives at the beginning an introduction in lossless compression algorithms, particularly for those based on Markov models. After that it concentrates on modeling. The emphasis of the book is set on adaptivity of models and dynamically swapping between locally and asymptotically adaptive models.

 

Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images

Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images

 

Authors: Ian Witten, Alistair Moffat and Timothy Bell,
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Publishing, San Francisco, United States of America, 2nd edition, 1999
ISBN: 1-55860-570-3
Size: 519 pages
Price: 59.95 USD

This book is a good introduction into information retrieval. The emphasis of the book is besides compression on indexing, querying and implementation aspects. Most of the compression algorithms treat lossless compression.

 

 People


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Name

Description

Timothy Bell

Timothy Bell
 

Timothy Bell works at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and is "father" of the Canterbury Corpus
 

John Cleary

John Cleary
 

John Cleary works at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, and has published several well known papers together with Ian Witten and Timothy Bell.
 

Jean-loup Gailly

Jean-loup Gailly
 

Jean-loup Gailly is the author of the well known GZIP compression program and the coauthor of Mark Nelson's book "The Data Compression Book". He lives in France and works in the image processing field for Vision IQ.
 

Alistair Moffat

Alistair Moffat
 

Alistair Moffat is working at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Together with Ian Witten and Timothy Bell he is author of the book "Managing Gigabytes".
 

Mark Nelson

Mark Nelson
 

Mark is the author of the famous compression site www.datacompression.info and has published articles in the data compression field for over ten years. He is an editor of the Dr. Dobb's Journal and author of the book "The Data Compression Book". He lives in the friendly Lone Star State Texas ("All My Ex's"...).
 

David Salomon

David Salomon
 

David Salomon works at the California State University, United States of America, at the computer science department. His research interests include computer graphics, data compression and cryptography. He is the author of the book "Data Compression: The Complete Reference"
 

Khalid Sayood

Khalid Sayood
 

Khalid Sayood is working at the department of electrical engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, United States of America. His research interests include data compression, image compression and packet video. He is the author of the book "Introduction to Data Compression"
 

Claude Shannon

Claude Shannon
 

Claude Shannon was born on 30th April 1916 in Gaylord, United States of America, and died on 24th Febuary 2001 in Medford, United States of America. He is the father of information theory and his most known work is the book "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" first published inside the Bell System Technical Journal in 1948.
 

Ross Williams

Ross Williams
 

Ross Williams is the creator of the newsgroups comp.compression and comp.compression.research, the author of the data compression algorithms LZRW1-LZRW5 and of the book "Adaptive Data Compression". He lives in Australia and works for Rocksoft.
 

Ian Witten

Ian Witten
 

Ian is working at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Together with John Cleary and Timothy Bell he published "Modeling for Text Compression".
 

 

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