Lossless preprocessing of floating point data to enhance compression

Abstract

Data compression algorithms typically rely on identifying repeated sequences of symbols from the original data to provide a compact representation of the same information, while maintaining the ability to recover the original data from the compressed sequence. Using data transformations prior to the compression process has the potential to enhance the compression capabilities, being lossless as long as the transformation is invertible. Floating point data presents unique challenges to generate invertible transformations with high compression potential. This paper identifies key conditions for basic operations of floating point data that guarantee lossless transformations. Then, we show four methods that make use of these observations to deliver lossless compression of real datasets, where we improve compression rates up to 40 %.