lilcom

This package lossily compresses 16-bit integer or floating-point NumPy arrays into NumPy arrays of characters, using between 4 and 8 bits per sample (this is selected by the user). The main anticipated use is in machine learning applications.

This package requires Python 3 and is not compatible with Python 2.

Installation

Using PyPi

From PyPi you can install this with just

pip3 install lilcom

Using Github Repository

To install lilcom first clone the repository;


git clone git@github.com:danpovey/lilcom.git

then run setup with install argument.

python3 setup.py install

(you may need to add the --user flag if you don't have system privileges). To test it, you can then cd to test and run:

python3 test_interface.py

How to use this compression method

The most common usage pattern will be as follows (showing Python code):

# Let a be a NumPy ndarray with type np.int16, np.float32 or np.float64

# compress a.
a_compressed = lilcom.compress(a, axis=1,
                               lpc_order=4,
                               bits_per_sample=8)
# decompress a
a_decompressed = lilcom.decompress(a_compressed, dtype=a.dtype)

Note: the compression is lossy so a_decompressed will not be exactly the same as a. The chosen bits_per_sample will depend on the application; 8 is normally suitable, but 5 or 6 should suffice for audio data that's sampled at a high rate like 44.1kHz.

The argument axis=1 specifies which axis which will be treated as the "time" axis. This should be the axis along which the user expects successive amples to be the most highly correlated, and also one that has reasonably long sequences (bear in mind that a 4-byte header is created for each sequence in that axis direction, so the dimension on that axis should be reasonably large or the compression would be ineffective).

Technical details

The algorithm is based on LPC prediction: LPC coefficients are estimated and it is the residual from the LPC prediction that is coded. The LPC coefficients are not transmitted; they are worked out from the past samples. The LPC order may be chosen by the user in the range 0 to 14; the default is 4. The residual is coded with an an exponent and a mantissa, like floating point numbers. Only 1 bit per sample is used to encode the exponent; the reason this is feasible is that it is the difference in the exponent from sample to sample that is actually encoded. The algorithm works out the lowest codable sequence of exponents such that the mantissas are in the codable range.

Because the LPC coefficients are estimated from past samples, this algorithm is very vulnerable to transmission errors: even a single bit error can make the entire file unreadable. This is acceptable in the kinds of applications we have in mind (mainly machine learning).

The algorithm requires an exact bitwise correspondence between the LPC computations when compressing and decompressing, so all computations are done in integer arithmetic and great care is taken to ensure that all arithmetic operations produce results that are fully defined by the C standard (this means that we need to avoid signed integer overflow and signed right-shift).