Data Compression
Motivation
Data compression is driven by the need to enhance the efficiency of digital information processing. Key benefits include:
- Improved storage efficiency
- Better utilization of transmission bandwidth
- Reduced transmission time
Importance
While the cost of storage and bandwidth has significantly decreased, the demand for capacity continues to rise rapidly. In many situations, increasing resources is either expensive or impractical. Compression offers a more economical and efficient use of existing infrastructure.
It is both a science and an art—representing information in compact form. Once a niche concern of specialists, data compression has become a foundational technology in modern digital communication.
Without it, practical advancements such as:
- Internet streaming
- Digital TV
- Mobile communication
- Video conferencing
would have been unattainable.
Role in Computer Science
Data compression remains a vibrant field of research. When we talk about compressing data, we’re referring to the development and implementation of algorithms that:
- Represent data with reduced redundancy
- Eliminate unnecessary information
- Apply efficient coding strategies, including both encoding and decoding