Jelkompresszió

Jelkompresszió, also known as signal compression, refers to the process of reducing the amount of data required to represent a signal. This is achieved by identifying and eliminating redundancy within the signal. The goal is to represent the same information using fewer bits, which leads to several benefits such as decreased storage space, faster transmission rates, and reduced bandwidth requirements.

There are two main categories of signal compression: lossless and lossy. Lossless compression aims to reduce data size without any loss of information. When the compressed signal is decompressed, it is an exact replica of the original. This is crucial for applications where data integrity is paramount, such as text documents or executable code. Examples include Huffman coding and Lempel-Ziv algorithms.

Lossy compression, on the other hand, achieves higher compression ratios by discarding some information that is deemed less important or imperceptible to humans. This type of compression is widely used for multimedia data like audio, images, and video, where perfect fidelity is not always necessary. Examples include JPEG for images, MP3 for audio, and MPEG for video. The perceived quality of the decompressed signal is a trade-off against the degree of compression achieved.

The choice between lossless and lossy compression depends on the specific application and the acceptable level of data degradation. Signal compression is a fundamental technique in digital communication, data storage, and multimedia processing, enabling efficient handling of the vast amounts of data generated in today's digital world.