algorithm.txt
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- 1. Compression algorithm (deflate)
- The deflation algorithm used by gzip (also zip and zlib) is a variation of
- LZ77 (Lempel-Ziv 1977, see reference below). It finds duplicated strings in
- the input data. The second occurrence of a string is replaced by a
- pointer to the previous string, in the form of a pair (distance,
- length). Distances are limited to 32K bytes, and lengths are limited
- to 258 bytes. When a string does not occur anywhere in the previous
- 32K bytes, it is emitted as a sequence of literal bytes. (In this
- description, `string' must be taken as an arbitrary sequence of bytes,
- and is not restricted to printable characters.)
- Literals or match lengths are compressed with one Huffman tree, and
- match distances are compressed with another tree. The trees are stored
- in a compact form at the start of each block. The blocks can have any
- size (except that the compressed data for one block must fit in
- available memory). A block is terminated when deflate() determines that
- it would be useful to start another block with fresh trees. (This is
- somewhat similar to the behavior of LZW-based _compress_.)
- Duplicated strings are found using a hash table. All input strings of
- length 3 are inserted in the hash table. A hash index is computed for
- the next 3 bytes. If the hash chain for this index is not empty, all
- strings in the chain are compared with the current input string, and
- the longest match is selected.
- The hash chains are searched starting with the most recent strings, to
- favor small distances and thus take advantage of the Huffman encoding.
- The hash chains are singly linked. There are no deletions from the
- hash chains, the algorithm simply discards matches that are too old.
- To avoid a worst-case situation, very long hash chains are arbitrarily
- truncated at a certain length, determined by a runtime option (level
- parameter of deflateInit). So deflate() does not always find the longest
- possible match but generally finds a match which is long enough.
- deflate() also defers the selection of matches with a lazy evaluation
- mechanism. After a match of length N has been found, deflate() searches for
- a longer match at the next input byte. If a longer match is found, the
- previous match is truncated to a length of one (thus producing a single
- literal byte) and the process of lazy evaluation begins again. Otherwise,
- the original match is kept, and the next match search is attempted only N
- steps later.
- The lazy match evaluation is also subject to a runtime parameter. If
- the current match is long enough, deflate() reduces the search for a longer
- match, thus speeding up the whole process. If compression ratio is more
- important than speed, deflate() attempts a complete second search even if
- the first match is already long enough.
- The lazy match evaluation is not performed for the fastest compression
- modes (level parameter 1 to 3). For these fast modes, new strings
- are inserted in the hash table only when no match was found, or
- when the match is not too long. This degrades the compression ratio
- but saves time since there are both fewer insertions and fewer searches.
- 2. Decompression algorithm (inflate)
- 2.1 Introduction
- The key question is how to represent a Huffman code (or any prefix code) so
- that you can decode fast. The most important characteristic is that shorter
- codes are much more common than longer codes, so pay attention to decoding the
- short codes fast, and let the long codes take longer to decode.
- inflate() sets up a first level table that covers some number of bits of
- input less than the length of longest code. It gets that many bits from the
- stream, and looks it up in the table. The table will tell if the next
- code is that many bits or less and how many, and if it is, it will tell
- the value, else it will point to the next level table for which inflate()
- grabs more bits and tries to decode a longer code.
- How many bits to make the first lookup is a tradeoff between the time it
- takes to decode and the time it takes to build the table. If building the
- table took no time (and if you had infinite memory), then there would only
- be a first level table to cover all the way to the longest code. However,
- building the table ends up taking a lot longer for more bits since short
- codes are replicated many times in such a table. What inflate() does is
- simply to make the number of bits in the first table a variable, and then
- to set that variable for the maximum speed.
- For inflate, which has 286 possible codes for the literal/length tree, the size
- of the first table is nine bits. Also the distance trees have 30 possible
- values, and the size of the first table is six bits. Note that for each of
- those cases, the table ended up one bit longer than the ``average'' code
- length, i.e. the code length of an approximately flat code which would be a
- little more than eight bits for 286 symbols and a little less than five bits
- for 30 symbols.
- 2.2 More details on the inflate table lookup
- Ok, you want to know what this cleverly obfuscated inflate tree actually
- looks like. You are correct that it's not a Huffman tree. It is simply a
- lookup table for the first, let's say, nine bits of a Huffman symbol. The
- symbol could be as short as one bit or as long as 15 bits. If a particular
- symbol is shorter than nine bits, then that symbol's translation is duplicated
- in all those entries that start with that symbol's bits. For example, if the
- symbol is four bits, then it's duplicated 32 times in a nine-bit table. If a
- symbol is nine bits long, it appears in the table once.
- If the symbol is longer than nine bits, then that entry in the table points
- to another similar table for the remaining bits. Again, there are duplicated
- entries as needed. The idea is that most of the time the symbol will be short
- and there will only be one table look up. (That's whole idea behind data
- compression in the first place.) For the less frequent long symbols, there
- will be two lookups. If you had a compression method with really long
- symbols, you could have as many levels of lookups as is efficient. For
- inflate, two is enough.
- So a table entry either points to another table (in which case nine bits in
- the above example are gobbled), or it contains the translation for the symbol
- and the number of bits to gobble. Then you start again with the next
- ungobbled bit.
- You may wonder: why not just have one lookup table for how ever many bits the
- longest symbol is? The reason is that if you do that, you end up spending
- more time filling in duplicate symbol entries than you do actually decoding.
- At least for deflate's output that generates new trees every several 10's of
- kbytes. You can imagine that filling in a 2^15 entry table for a 15-bit code
- would take too long if you're only decoding several thousand symbols. At the
- other extreme, you could make a new table for every bit in the code. In fact,
- that's essentially a Huffman tree. But then you spend two much time
- traversing the tree while decoding, even for short symbols.
- So the number of bits for the first lookup table is a trade of the time to
- fill out the table vs. the time spent looking at the second level and above of
- the table.
- Here is an example, scaled down:
- The code being decoded, with 10 symbols, from 1 to 6 bits long:
- A: 0
- B: 10
- C: 1100
- D: 11010
- E: 11011
- F: 11100
- G: 11101
- H: 11110
- I: 111110
- J: 111111
- Let's make the first table three bits long (eight entries):
- 000: A,1
- 001: A,1
- 010: A,1
- 011: A,1
- 100: B,2
- 101: B,2
- 110: -> table X (gobble 3 bits)
- 111: -> table Y (gobble 3 bits)
- Each entry is what the bits decode as and how many bits that is, i.e. how
- many bits to gobble. Or the entry points to another table, with the number of
- bits to gobble implicit in the size of the table.
- Table X is two bits long since the longest code starting with 110 is five bits
- long:
- 00: C,1
- 01: C,1
- 10: D,2
- 11: E,2
- Table Y is three bits long since the longest code starting with 111 is six
- bits long:
- 000: F,2
- 001: F,2
- 010: G,2
- 011: G,2
- 100: H,2
- 101: H,2
- 110: I,3
- 111: J,3
- So what we have here are three tables with a total of 20 entries that had to
- be constructed. That's compared to 64 entries for a single table. Or
- compared to 16 entries for a Huffman tree (six two entry tables and one four
- entry table). Assuming that the code ideally represents the probability of
- the symbols, it takes on the average 1.25 lookups per symbol. That's compared
- to one lookup for the single table, or 1.66 lookups per symbol for the
- Huffman tree.
- There, I think that gives you a picture of what's going on. For inflate, the
- meaning of a particular symbol is often more than just a letter. It can be a
- byte (a "literal"), or it can be either a length or a distance which
- indicates a base value and a number of bits to fetch after the code that is
- added to the base value. Or it might be the special end-of-block code. The
- data structures created in inftrees.c try to encode all that information
- compactly in the tables.
- Jean-loup Gailly Mark Adler
- jloup@gzip.org madler@alumni.caltech.edu
- References:
- [LZ77] Ziv J., Lempel A., ``A Universal Algorithm for Sequential Data
- Compression,'' IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol. 23, No. 3,
- pp. 337-343.
- ``DEFLATE Compressed Data Format Specification'' available in
- http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1951.txt