Programmatic Compression of Images and Sound

The importance of digital data compression in the future media arena cannot be overestimated. A novel approach to data compression is built on Genetic Programming. This technique has been referred to as "programmatic compression". In this paper we apply a variant of programmatic compression to the compression of bitmap images and sampled digital sound. The work presented here constitutes the rst successful result of genetic programming applied to compression of real full size images and sound. A compiling genetic programming system is used for eeciency reasons. Diierent related issues are discussed, such as the handling of very large tness case sets.