Offline dictionary-based compression

Dictionary-based modelling is the mechanism used in many practical compression schemes. We use the full message (or a large block of it) to infer a complete dictionary in advance, and include an explicit representation of the dictionary as part of the compressed message. Intuitively, the advantage of this offline approach is that with the benefit of having access to all of the message, it should be possible to optimize the choice of phrases so as to maximize compression performance. Indeed, we demonstrate that very good compression can be attained by an offline method without compromising the fast decoding that is a distinguishing characteristic of dictionary-based techniques. Several nontrivial sources of overhead, in terms of both computation resources required to perform the compression, and bits generated into the compressed message, have to be carefully managed as part of the offline process. To meet this challenge, we have developed a novel phrase derivation method and a compact dictionary encoding. In combination these two techniques produce the compression scheme RE-PAIR, which is highly efficient, particularly in decompression.