Recent advances in communication and computer technologies have made possible the exchange and retrieval of information through the electronic media. To transmit and store digital data efficiently, variety of data compression algorithms have been developed. Yet, information in compressed data cannot be easily retrieved or modified without decompression. While the research body on compression schemes is quite rich, algorithm for retrieving and modifying information in compressed data have not been widely investigated. The first objective of this research is to identify operations that can be applied directly and efficiently to digital information encoded by a given compression algorithm. A formal method of analysis is planned. The second objective is to develop new compression techniques which allow rapid execution of a given set of operations on compressed data. This project mainly focuses on lossless compression techniques and information processing algorithms for binary document images and text data. In addition to leading to new discoveries in coding and information processing, this research is expected to find applications in document analysis and information retrieval.

Research Assistants

Shulan Deng, Ph.D. Student

Jun Zhao, Ph.D. Student