ABSTRACT
This chapter examines topics applicable to the encoding and compression of signals, that is, waveforms and images. Signal coding and compression seem destined always to be necessary parts of the world of digital signal processing. Every time the technology offers twice the amount of storage capacity, users discover they have more than twice the amount of information to store. The objective is to reduce or compress the number of bits in the representation of a signal or image or to remove unnecessary or redundant information from a signal in ways that reduce its size and yet allow its restoration. In coding theory, a sample of a waveform or a pixel in an image becomes a symbol, and in some kinds of coding, there is a symbol code associated with each symbol. A transformation is easier to discover when the data contains redundant information, such as a repeated sequence of samples. The chapter discusses distinction between lossless and lossy signal compression.
