we ‘hip 7» Ont compression full exaciness: instead they are quantized acoording to a specific resolution and ‘curve. This can also be considered equivaleat to the p-law and A- law, which are used for audio data (JN84}, In the transformed domain, the results ccan be teated differently depending on their impontance (e-g., quantized different numbers of bits). characterist 4.Entzopy coding starts with a sequential data stream of individual bits and bytes. Different techniques can be used here to perform a final, lossless compression, For example, frequently occurring long sequences of zeroes can be compressed by specifying the number of occurrences followed by the zero ise Pieture processing and quantization an be repeated iteratively, such asin the case of Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation (ADPCM). There can either be “Tee back” (as occurs during delta modulation), oF multiple techniques can be applied to the data one after the other (like interframe and intraframe coding in the ease of MPEG). Afier these four compression steps, the digital data are placed ina data stream having & defined format, which may also integrate the image starting point and type of compres- sion. An error correetion code ean also be added at this poiat. igure 7-1 shows the compression process applied to a still image; the same prin ciples can also be applied to video and audio data. vacompened [icine | [Pare emt [gf camry |_compeguet Powe Prepsin|—>}Prcesing/—>| Stson Calm? | fee Figure 7-1 Major steps of data compression Decompression is the inverse process of compression. Specific coders and decod- ‘ers can be implemented very differently. Symmetric coding is characterized by compa- rable costs for encoding and decoding, which is especially desirable for dialogue applications. In an asymmetric technique, the decoding process is considerably less costly than the cosing process, This is intended for applications where compression is performed once and decompression takes place very frequently, or ifthe decompression ‘must take place very quickly. For example, an audio-visual course module is produced ‘ut subsequently decoded by the many students who use it. The main requirement is realtime decompression. An asymmetric technique can be used to increase the {quality of the compressed images. The follows a techniques. Subsequent sections describe hybrid tochniques frequently used in the multimedia field. section discusses some basic compressi