LZW

Definition: Lempel-Ziv Welch: type of file compression, widely used to reduce file size without loss of data. * It takes a length of data from the incoming stream and gives it a code, then it codes the next length and so on. These codes go into a table together with their number of occurences: thus the entire data stream may be coded and compressed, without any loss of information. * It is an adaptive compression, used e.g. with TIFF and GIF formats.

Related Terms: adaptive compression, TIFF

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