Case study

To wrap up this chapter, and the book, let's build a basic image compression tool. It will take black and white images (with 1 bit per pixel, either on or off) and attempt to compress it using a very basic form of compression known as run-length encoding. You may find black and white images a bit far-fetched. If so, you haven't enjoyed enough hours at http://xkcd.com!

I've included some sample black and white BMP images (which are easy to read data into and leave a lot of opportunity to improve on file size) with the example code for this chapter.

We'll be compressing the images using a simple technique called run-length encoding. This technique basically takes a sequence of bits and replaces any strings of repeated bits with the number ...

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