Content-aware lossless compression and decompression of floating point data

Abstract

Lossless content-aware compression and decompression techniques are provided for floating point data, such as seismic data. A minimum-length compression technique exploits an association between an exponent and a length of the significand, which corresponds to the position of the least significant bit of the significand. A reduced number of bits from the significand can then be stored. A prediction method is also optionally previously applied, so that residual values with shorter lengths are compressed instead of the original values. An alignment compression technique exploits repetition patterns in the floating point numbers when they are aligned to the same exponent. Floating point numbers are then split into integral and fractional parts. The fractional part is separately encoded using a dictionary-based compression method, while the integral part is compressed using a delta-encoding method. A prediction method is also optionally previously applied to the integral part, thereby increasing the compression ratio.