Stanford Compression Library (SCL): A brief tutorial

This document provides an overview of motivation and SCL structure. We end this tutorial with an exercise on SCL and show how to use SCL in google colab notebook. For students, it is highly recommended to attempt the exercise. Please reach out to the teaching staff if you have any questions.

Introduction

The Stanford Compression Library is being implemented to aid research in the area of data compression. As students working in the field of data compression, we noticed that although these pieces of software are used everyday (gzip, jpeg etc); unfortunately there is no good pedagogical/research implementation which can be tweaked quickly.

The goals of SCL are:

• To provide pedagogical implementations of common data compression algorithms
• To provide convenient framework to quickly modify existing compression algorithm and to aid research in the area
• More selfishly, to understand these algorithms better :)

Installation

Before we dive deep into the library, please make sure you have followed the installation instructions in the README and that all the tests are passing. Please file an issue if you face problems with the setup.

Using the library

Let's look at the library structure next to understand how to use the library. Please look at next section on SCL basics to understand the basic building blocks of SCL.

Exercise

After understanding the abstractions and various classes introduced, lets take a look at the following exercise. This was a problem from year 2022 homework, and so to make it most useful it might be best to treat it as such!