Now days we must handle large amounts of multimedia data such as
text, image, video, and audio. It should be clear that multimedia
data compression is indispensable for various applications. In
order to treat uniformly all the media, a new data compression
scheme is required Since most media are represented in a digital
form, it is natural to apply a technique that was proved successful
for inherently digital media such as text, namely Lempel-Ziv type
schemes. We shall propose such a scheme that works for all media by
extending lossless Lempel-Ziv to a lossy scheme based on
approximate pattern matching. Experimental results for Pattern
Matching Image Compression (PMIC) showed great potential for such a
scheme. The following features of this new homogeneous pattern
matching compression scheme should appeal to various applications:
(i) theory (there is an information-theoretical explanation why
this scheme should work well, which suggests that it may yield more
reliable performance than heuristic/ad hoc approaches); (ii)
fast/efficient decompression (this scheme does not require powerful
computing resources on the decompression end); (iii) good handling
of high frequencies (for image compression the scheme does not blur
the high frequency information such as edges, etc.); (iv) uniform
approach to multimedia (as mentioned above, by re-defining
distortion measure we can use this approach to put together a
uniform approach to all media such as text, image, video, sound,
etc.).