viii • The second new chapter, Chapter 6, discusses video compression. The chapter opens with a general description of CRT operation and basic analog and digital video concepts. It continues with a general discussion of video compression, and it concludes with a description of MPEG-1 and H.261. • Audio compression is the topic of the third new chapter, Chapter 7. The first topic in this chapter is the properties of the human audible system and how they can be exploited to achieve lossy audio compression. A discussion of a few simple audio compression methods follows, and the chapter concludes with a description of the three audio layers of MPEG-1, including the very popular mp3 format. Other new material consists of the following: • Conditional image RLE (Section 1.4.2). • Scalar quantization (Section 1.6). • The QM coder used in JPEG, JPEG 2000, and JBIG is now included in Sec­ tion 2.16. • Context-tree weighting is discussed in Section 2.19. Its extension to lossless image compression is the topic of Section 4.24. • Section 3.4 discusses a sliding buffer method called repetition times. • The troublesome issue of patents is now also included (Section 3.25). • The relatively unknown Gray codes are discussed in Section 4.2.1, in connection with image compression. • Section 4.3 discusses intuitive methods for image compression, such as subs- pling and vector quantization.

"A wonderful treasure chest of information; spanning a wide range of data compression methods, from simple test compression methods to the use of wavelets in image compression. It is unusual for a text on compression to cover the field so completely." – ACM Computing Reviews

The proliferation of massive data sets brings with it a series of special computational challenges. This "data avalanche" arises in a wide range of scientific and commercial applications. With advances in computer and information technologies, many of these challenges are beginning to be addressed by diverse inter-disciplinary groups, that indude computer scientists, mathematicians, statisticians and engineers, working in dose cooperation with application domain experts. High profile applications indude astrophysics, bio-technology, demographics, finance, geographi­ cal information systems, government, medicine, telecommunications, the environment and the internet. John R. Tucker of the Board on Mathe­ matical Seiences has stated: "My interest in this problern (Massive Data Sets) isthat I see it as the rnost irnportant cross-cutting problern for the rnathernatical sciences in practical problern solving for the next decade, because it is so pervasive.

Multimedia is a ubiquitous part of the technological environment in which we work and think, touching upon almost all aspects of computer science and engineering.

Compressing data is an option naturally selected when faced with problems of high costs or restricted space. Written by a renowned expert in the field, this book offers readers a succinct, reader-friendly foundation to the chief approaches, methods and techniques currently employed in the field of data compression.

"A wonderful treasure chest of information; spanning a wide range of data compression methods, from simple text compression methods to the use of wavelets in image compression. It is unusual for a text on compression to cover the field so completely." – ACM Computing Reviews.