Data Compression Techniques and Standards

In the previous chapter, we see that the performance of a storage system depends on the amount of data being retrieved. The size of multimedia objects are however very large in size. Thus, the performance of the storage system can be enhanced if the object sizes are reduced. Therefore, multimedia objects are always compressed when they are stored. In addition, the performance of most subsystems depends on the amount of data being processed. Since multimedia objects are large in size, their accessing times are long. Thus, multimedia objects are always kept in their compressed form when they are being stored, retrieved, and processed. We shall describe the commonly used compression techniques and compression standards in this chapter. We first describe the general compression model in the next section. Then, we explain the techniques in compressing textual data. This is followed by the image compression techniques. In particular, we shall explain the JPEG2000 compression with details. Lastly, we explain the MPEG2 video compression standard. These compression techniques are helpful to understand the multimedia data being stored and retrieved.