Summary

This book is intended to provide engineering and/or statistics students, communications engineers, and mathematicians with the firm theoretic basis of source coding (or data compression) in information theory. Although information theory consists of two main areas, source coding and channel coding, the authors choose here to focus only on source coding. The reason is that, in a sense, it is more basic than channel coding, and also because of recent achievements in source coding and compression. An important feature of the book is that whenever possible, the authors describe universal coding methods, i.e., the methods that can be used without prior knowledge of the statistical properties of the data. The authors approach the subject of source coding from the very basics to the top frontiers in an intuitively transparent, but mathematically sound, manner.