Complex sentence: Gabor saw in his atoms a possibility to transmit the same information but using less data, instead of transmitting the signal itself it would be possible to transmit only the coefficients which represent the same signal using his atoms.
Split into simpler sentences: Gabor saw in his atoms a possibility to transmit the same information but using less data. Instead of transmitting the signal itself it would be possible to transmit only the coefficients which represent the same signal using his atoms.