Burrows–Wheeler compression: Principles and reflections

AbstractAfter a general description of the Burrows–Wheeler transform and a brief survey of recent work on processing its output, the paper examines the coding of the zero-runs from the MTF recoding stage, an aspect with little prior treatment. It is concluded that the original scheme proposed by Wheeler is extremely efficient and unlikely to be much improved.The paper then proposes some new interpretations and uses of the Burrows–Wheeler transform, with new insights and approaches to lossless compression, perhaps including techniques from error correction

Empirical analysis of BWT-based lossless image compression

The Burrows-Wheeler Transformation (BWT) is a text transformation algorithm originally designed to improve the coherence in text data. This coherence can be exploited by compression algorithms such as run-length encoding or arithmetic coding. However, there is still a debate on its performance on images. Motivated by a theoretical analysis of the performance of BWT and MTF, we perform a detailed empirical study on the role of MTF in compressing images with the BWT. This research studies the compression performance of BWT on digital images using different predictors and context partitions. The major interest of the research is in finding efficient ways to make BWT suitable for lossless image compression.;This research studied three different approaches to improve the compression of image data by BWT. First, the idea of preprocessing the image data before sending it to the BWT compression scheme is studied by using different mapping and prediction schemes. Second, different variations of MTF were investigated to see which one works best for Image compression with BWT. Third, the concept of context partitioning for BWT output before it is forwarded to the next stage in the compression scheme.;For lossless image compression, this thesis proposes the removal of the MTF stage from the BWT compression pipeline and the usage of context partitioning method. The compression performance is further improved by using MED predictor on the image data along with the 8-bit mapping of the prediction residuals before it is processed by BWT.;This thesis proposes two schemes for BWT-based image coding, namely BLIC and BLICx, the later being based on the context-ordering property of the BWT. Our methods outperformed other text compression algorithms such as PPM, GZIP, direct BWT, and WinZip in compressing images. Final results showed that our methods performed better than the state of the art lossless image compression algorithms, such as JPEG-LS, JPEG2000, CALIC, EDP and PPAM on the natural images

Burrows‐Wheeler post‐transformation with effective clustering and interpolative coding

Lossless compression methods based on the Burrows‐Wheeler transform (BWT) are regarded as an excellent compromise between speed and compression efficiency: they provide compression rates close to the PPM algorithms, with the speed of dictionary‐based methods. Instead of the laborious statistics‐gathering process used in PPM, the BWT reversibly sorts the input symbols, using as the sort key as many following characters as necessary to make the sort unique. Characters occurring in similar contexts are sorted close together, resulting in a clustered symbol sequence. Run‐length encoding and Move‐to‐Front (MTF) recoding, combined with a statistical Huffman or arithmetic coder, is then typically used to exploit the clustering. A drawback of the MTF recoding is that knowledge of the character that produced the MTF number is lost. In this paper, we present a new, competitive Burrows‐Wheeler posttransform stage that takes advantage of interpolative coding—a fast binary encoding method for integer sequences, being able to exploit clusters without requiring explicit statistics. We introduce a fast and simple way to retain knowledge of the run characters during the MTF recoding and use this to improve the clustering of MTF numbers and run‐lengths by applying reversible, stable sorting, with the run characters as sort keys, achieving significant improvement in the compression rate, as shown here by experiments on common text corpora.</p