Compressing sets of integers
US5940833A · kind A · utility
Assignee
Inventor
Key dates
| Filing date | Jul 12, 1996 |
| Grant date | Aug 17, 1999 |
| Priority date | — |
| Expiry date | Jul 12, 2016 |
Classification
- Technology area (CPC Y)Emerging Cross-Sectional Technologies
- CPC primaryY10S707/99942
- WIPO fieldBasic communication processes
- WIPO sectorElectrical engineering
Abstract
In one aspect, the disclosed technique detects common leading byte patterns in the integers so that these patterns need only be stored once in the encoded byte stream. Those integers that share a common leading byte pattern are stored in truncated form, without their common leading bytes. These truncated integers may themselves be further examined to determine if any of them share additional common leading bytes beyond those already detected. Thus, the technique lends itself naturally to description using the language of trees. Integers with a common leading byte pattern are stored as child nodes, their parent being the node containing the common byte pattern. Child nodes consist only of those bytes remaining after the initial byte pattern has been extracted; the greater the number of children, the greater are the efficiency gains. All the children of a given tree or subtree are similarly examined for common leading byte patterns, ignoring those bytes that are already accounted for in their ancestor nodes. In a second aspect, the disclosed technique makes use of "clustering", a second type of locality that is not reached by the interval concept. A cluster is a sequence of singleton…
Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.