Raster Data Compression
We can distinguish different ways of storing raster data, which basically vary in storage size and consequently in the geometric organisation of the storage. The following types of geometric elements are identified:
Lines
Stripes
Tiles
Areas (e.g. Quad-trees)
Hierarchy of resolution
Raster data are managed easily in computers; all commonly used programming languages well support array handling. However, a raster when stored in a raw state with no compression can be extremely inefficient in terms of computer storage space.
As already said the way of improving raster space efficiency is data compression.
Illustrations and short texts are used to describe different methods of raster data storage and raster data compression techniques.