The effect of non-greedy parsing in Ziv-Lempel compression methods

Abstract

Most practical compression methods in the LZ77 and LZ78 families parse their input using a greedy heuristic. However the popular gzip compression program demonstrates that modest but significant gains in compression performance are possible if non-greedy parsing is used. Practical implementations for using non-greedy parsing in LZ77 and LZ78 compression are explored and some experimental measurements are presented.