Base64 scheme is used in URL encoding to escape special reserved characters for transmission over internet. It is also useful for image, audio/video, document encoding and transmission over the network. It is more compact and a more human readable and understandable format than the binary system of 1's and 0's. Compared to hexadecimal encoding, it encodes more chars with less bytes.Therefore, it is considered more efficient than hexadecimal (Hexadecimal uses 8 bytes for 4 chars, Base64 uses 3 bytes for 4 chars)