Book excerpt: "Khalid Sayood provides an extensive introduction to the theory underlying today's compression techniques with detailed instruction for their applications using several examples to explain the concepts. Encompassing the entire field of data compression Introduction to Data Compression, includes lossless and lossy compression, Huffman coding, arithmetic coding, dictionary techniques, context based compression, scalar and vector quantization. Khalid Sayood provides a working knowledge of data compression, giving the reader the tools to develop a complete and concise compression package upon completion of his book."--BOOK JACKET.