We describe a universal information compression scheme that compresses any
pure quantum i.i.d. source asymptotically to its von Neumann entropy, with no
prior knowledge of the structure of the source. We introduce a diagonalisation
procedure that enables any classical compression algorithm to be utilised in a
quantum context. Our scheme is then based on the corresponding quantum
translation of the classical Lempel-Ziv algorithm. Our methods lead to a
conceptually simple way of estimating the entropy of a source in terms of the
measurement of an associated length parameter while maintaining high fidelity
for long blocks. As a by-product we also estimate the eigenbasis of the source.
Since our scheme is based on the Lempel-Ziv method, it can be applied also to
target sequences that are not i.i.d.Comment: 17 pages, no figures. A preliminary version of this work was
presented at EQIS '02, Tokyo, September 200
