摘要 |
The present invention aims to improve the compression ratio of an encoding method using a dictionary for such as LZ77, LZ78 or LZW for a sample string of an audio signal or an image signal. According to the present invention, the samples are aligned from the MSB side (73), and for an NC-th (NC is the character size, for example, eight bits) character C1(i), the samples are partitioned by starting from the MSB side, and a partitioned portion less than NC is added with dummy bits“0”until the size reaches NC to form a character (74). In this processing, lower bits in the samples can be ignored, mask data M1(i) is created in which digits in the ignorable bit and dummy bits for each C1(i) are set to“0”and effective bits (digits) are set to“1”(75), C1(i) is compared with each character D(j) in a character string for an index j in the dictionary using M1(i) to check whether or not there are matches for effective digits portions in C1(i). If there are matches, C1(i) is considered to match D(j).
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