A fast and efficient post BWT-stage for the Burrows-Wheeler compression algorithm

Summary form only given. A new stage for the Burrows-Wheeler compression algorithm (BWCA) is presented, called incremental frequency count (IFC), which, together with a run length encoding (RLE) stage, is located between the Burrows-Wheeler transform (BWT) and the entropy coding (EC) stage of the algorithm. The IFC stage offers a high throughput similar to a move-to-front (MTF) stage combined with good compression rates, similar to the strong, but slow, weighted frequency count (WFC) stage. A BWCA based on an IFC stage and a corresponding RLE stage achieves compression times twice as fast as one based on a WFC stage, while the compression rates are under the top values of the BWT based compression algorithms.