The present invention relates to information compression. In particular, the present invention relates to increasing the compressibility of the information.
Information compression systems are used to compress information and thereby decrease storage requirements. Additionally, compressed information can be transferred more rapidly between physical locations than uncompressed information. Maintaining information in a compressed format decreases hardware requirements in communication and information systems.
Information compression may be achieved using a number of different techniques. For example, information compression can be accomplished by recognizing recurring patterns in the information. A dictionary is created based upon the recurring patterns. The dictionary contains a list of tokens, each of which corresponds to one of the recurring patterns. Using this technique of information compression, compressed information takes the form of a string of tokens along with an appropriate dictionary which contains definitions of each token.
The efficiency of information compression systems is limited by the form of the information. For example, if a stream of information appears highly chaotic, an information compression system will have only limited success in compressing the information stream. On the other hand, an information stream which is highly ordered can be greatly compressed. Typically, information is treated as a linear stream of data, without regard to increasing the level of order of the information. This is probably due to the linear nature of information storage and transmission systems presently employed. A data stream can be interpreted in two dimensions such as, for example, a bit mapped image. However, when compressing two-dimensional data, the traditional perspective is to "read" documents or images from top to bottom and left to right and thereby convert them into a linear format.
An improved information compression system which provides increased data compression would be a significant contribution to the art.