Methods and Apparatus for Reducing Storage Size
24 Assignments
0 Petitions
Accused Products
Abstract
Prediction-based compression engines are spoon-fed with sequentially efficiently compressible (SEC) streams of input data that make it possible for the compression engines to more efficiently compress or otherwise compact the incoming data than would be possible with streams of input data accepted on a TV-raster scan basis. Various techniques are disclosed for intentionally forming SEC input data streams. Among these are the tight packing of alike files or fragments into concatenation suitcases and the decomposition of files into substantially predictably consistent (SPC) fragments or segments that are routed to different suitcases according to their type. In a graphics-directed embodiment, image frames are partitioned into segment areas that are internally SPC and multidirectional walks (i.e., U-turning walks) are defined in the segment areas where these defined walks are traced during compression and also during decompression. A variety of pre-compression data transformation methods are disclosed for causing apparently random data sequences to appear more compressibly alike to each other. The methods are usable in systems that permit substantially longer times for data compaction operations than for data decompaction operations.
43 Citations
108 Claims
-
1-21. -21. (canceled)
-
22-25. -25. (canceled)
-
26-27. -27. (canceled)
-
28-60. -60. (canceled)
-
61. A machine-implemented data compaction/decompaction method comprising:
-
(a) identifying one or more times of expected slack in user initiated demand for a finite data throughput rate capability of one or more specified ones of storage providing drives; (b) during one or more of the identified slack times, automatically fetching one or more files or file fragments stored on the specified drives where the fetched files or file fragments that are not expected to be demanded by a user during the identified slack times, and if a so-fetched object (file or fragment) is deflated, inflating the object so as to better expose its informational content; (c) analyzing attributes of the fetched and optionally inflated one or more objects so as to thereby initially classify each of the fetched and undeflated objects as calling for one or more classes of pre-compression treatment including possible decomposition into finer fragments having respectively different classifications and including routing of so-classified fragments to respective suitcases associated with respective ones of the different pre-compression treatments; and (d) during one or more of the identified slack times, automatically moving the analyzed objects into concatenated positions in respective suitcases respectively associated with the different pre-compression treatments and generating first redirection vectors pointing to the new locations of the moved objects. - View Dependent Claims (62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71)
-
-
72-78. -78. (canceled)
-
79-85. -85. (canceled)
-
86-87. -87. (canceled)
-
88-106. -106. (canceled)
-
107. (canceled)
-
108-115. -115. (canceled)
Specification