Abstract
Run-length algorithms are simple, fast, and effective for a source that contains many long runs. The HDC (Hardware data compression) algorithm is a good example of such an approach that is still in use. One good way of studying algorithms is to play with examples. This chapter considers a type of redundancy where a consecutive sequence of symbols can be identified, and introduce a class of simple but useful lossless compression algorithms called run-length algorithms or run-length encoding (RLE for short). The ideas and approaches of the run-length compression techniques are first introduced in the chapter. Then it moves on to show how the algorithm design techniques learned in earlier chapters can be applied to solve the compression problem. The consecutive recurrent symbols are usually called runs in a sequence of symbols. Hence the source data of interest is a sequence of symbols from an alphabet. The goal of the run-length algorithm is to identify the runs and record the length of each run and the symbol in the run. For convenience, a simplified version of the HDC algorithm is used in this chapter.
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