Daniel Lemire's blog

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Run-length encoding (part I)

6 thoughts on “Run-length encoding (part I)”

  1. Kevembuangga says:

    With this “obsessive” interest in RLE may be you should think again about the compression scheme we talked about in emails on 19 Sep 2009 and which you didn’t seem to grok:
    It’s actually iterated hierarchical RLE with a fancy encoding of (what serves as) “counters”.

  2. Parand says:

    Thanks Daniel for the beautifully concise explanation of RLE. Makes me wonder how it can seem complex in other explanations.

  3. @Kevembuangga I’m interested in RLE because it is a fundamental idea. I’ll gladly study any form of RLE if I have proper documentation.

    I could try to guess what iterated hierarchical RLE with a fancy encoding means, but that is not a very interesting game.

  4. Kevembuangga says:

    I’ll gladly study any form of RLE if I have proper documentation.

    I am afraid there isn’t any documentation.
    As I told you this is something I stumbled upon when peeking at reverse engineering of a compression utility.
    This wasn’t academic, only engineering, sorry 🙂

  5. Kevembuangga says:

    P.S. To explain my (lack of) motivation, since I do not personally enjoy the hairsplitting about nitty gritty details and umphteenth decimals which show up in “academic” research I don’t feel it’s worth the effort to elaborate on this.
    I am not even sure it is worth your efforts, it may lack “nice properties” to write about, yet it was effective in a commercial product.

  6. @Kevembuangga Let me put it differently. Could you implement the a scheme like the one you described?