1. Introduction

This section is part of the compression topic.

Before reading this area, please ensure that you are familiar with the general section on compression. This will give you the background needed to underdstand this topic.

We are going to discuss a very popular method of acheiving lossless compression algorithm called Run Length Encoding or RLE.

This method relies on the presence of repeating patterns in the data you want to compress. For example, bitmap image files often have lots of areas with the same colour.