Computer Engineering Commons^™

Entropy And Certainty In Lossless Data Compression, James Jay Jacobs

Dissertations

Data compression is the art of using encoding techniques to represent data symbols using less storage space compared to the original data representation. The encoding process builds a relationship between the entropy of the data and the certainty of the system. The theoretical limits of this relationship are defined by the theory of entropy in information that was proposed by Claude Shannon. Lossless data compression is uniquely tied to entropy theory as the data and the system have a static definition. The static nature of the two requires a mechanism to reduce the entropy without the ability to alter either …