A locally adaptive data compression strategy for Chinese-English characters

Abstract

A locally adaptive data compression strategy can be efficiently applied to a text data file when characters are used frequently over short intervals. Some data files, such as program files, image files, or exposition files of application software contain some commonly used sequences of characters which occur consecutively. We can use their common characteristics to develop a simple heuristic method of compression. Among all kinds of compression schemes based upon a locally adaptive data compression strategy, the MTF (Move-To-Front) method is a superior one that can be easily implemented and can obtain a higher compression rate for most data files. This article uses the idea of a locally adaptive compression strategy and proposes a new data compression mechanism for Chinese and English data files. Some experimental results show that our proposed method can achieve a higher compression rate than using multigroup Huffman encoding, which is a method recently proposed by Chang and Tsai for Chinese data files.