Written by the Fiveable Content Team • Last updated September 2025
Verified for the 2026 exam
Verified for the 2026 exam•Written by the Fiveable Content Team • Last updated September 2025
Definition
Lossless compression algorithms are methods used to compress data files without losing any information. The compressed file can be fully restored to its original form without any loss of data.
Related terms
Run-Length Encoding (RLE): It is a simple lossless compression algorithm that replaces consecutive repeated characters or symbols with a count and the character itself.
Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) Compression: It is a popular lossless compression algorithm used in file formats such as GIF and TIFF, which builds a dictionary of frequently occurring patterns and replaces them with shorter codes.
Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT): It is another lossless compression technique that rearranges the characters in a string to improve compressibility by exploiting similarities between adjacent characters.