Patent ID: 8537038

Claim:
A method of sequentially compressing data, on a symbol-by-symbol basis, said method comprising the steps of: (a) determining whether a symbol currently being encoded is identical to an immediately preceding symbol; (b) encoding the result of step (a) as a binary event; (c) if the result in step (a) is positive, ending the encoding of the symbol; (d) if the result in step (a) is negative, proceeding to step (e); (e) determining, whether there is a constant difference between several previous pairs of symbols; (f) if the result in step (e) is positive: (i) determining, whether the difference between the current symbol a and the symbol immediately preceding it b is the same as the difference between the symbol b and the symbol immediately preceding it c; (ii) encoding the result of step (i) as a binary event; (iii) if the result in step (i) is positive, ending the encoding of the symbol; (iv) if the result in step (i) is negative, proceeding to step (h); (g) if the result in step (e) is negative, proceeding to step (h); (h) encoding the symbol using a bitwise operation in which bits of the symbol's binary representation are processed sequentially from the most significant bit to the least significant bit.