Abstract:
In this work, we address the problem of lossless compression of scientific
and medical floating-point volume data. We propose two prediction-based
compression methods that share a common framework, which consists of a
switched prediction scheme wherein the best predictor out of a preset group
of linear predictors is selected. Such a scheme is able to adapt to different
datasets as well as to varying statistics within the data. The first method,
called APE (Adaptive Polynomial Encoder), uses a family of structured
interpolating polynomials for prediction, while the second method, which we
refer to as ACE (Adaptive Combined Encoder), combines predictors from
previous work with the polynomial predictors to yield a more flexible,
powerful encoder that is able to effectively decorrelate a wide range of
data. In addition, in order to facilitate efficient visualization of
compressed data, our scheme provides an option to partition floating-point
values in such a way as to provide a progressive representation. We compare
our two compressors to existing state-of-the-art lossless floating-point
compressors for scientific data, with our data suite including both computer
simulations and observational measurements. The results demonstrate that our
polynomial predictor, APE, is comparable to previous approaches in terms of
speed but achieves better compression rates on average. ACE, our combined
predictor, while somewhat slower, is able to achieve the best compression
rate on all datasets, with significantly better rates on most of the
datasets.