METHOD AND DEVICE FOR ENCODING AND DECODING OF SYMBOL SEQUENCES WHEREIN EACH SYMBOL MAY HAVE ONE OUT OF THREE OR MORE POSSIBLE SYMBOL VALUES

摘要

A method for compressing a symbol sequence, wherein each symbol may have one out of three or more possible symbol values, said method comprises the steps of modifying the symbol sequence by replacing each run pair, which contains a first run of symbols of a most frequent symbol value and a second run of symbols of a second most frequent symbol value, by a further symbol value not comprised in the three or more possible symbol values, generating a binary sequence comprising all replaced run pairs and compression encoding the binary sequence and the modified symbol sequence.