CMedia Compressor: An Application to Graphically Compare General Compression Algorithms and Adaptive Huffman Compression Algorithm

Much discussion and research has been done on compression algorithms but not many have gone to the extent of developing an application that can test and compare various compression algorithms with each other. In this paper, we present an application known as the CMedia Compressor, that tests and compares various compression algorithms. The application shows that adaptive Huffman and Arithmetic Coding tend to outperform the others such as the Run-length encoding (RLE), Huffman coding, Arithmetic coding (AC) and Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) methods. Results obtained from this study are discussed and also presented graphically. The study's results indicates that Arithmetic coding yields higher space-savings than Huffman coding and Adaptive Huffman coding.