Compression by Substring Enumeration and Its Related Topics: As a Bridge Between Offline Universal Codes

Abstract

This article surveys a recently introduced data compression method known as compression by substring enumeration (CSE) and its related topics. CSE is an offline, lossless universal code, which encodes an entire data sequence as a single block without using prior knowledge of the information source. It is strongly related to existing offline compression methods such as enumerative codes, the block-sorting method, and the antidictionary method. Various interesting characteristics are seen in several fields from information theory to algorithms and data structures in the development of CSE. CSE leads to a better understanding of a class of offline lossless compression algorithms.