Universal data compression with LDPC codes

We present a new universal noiseless compressor of sources with memory based on the concatenation of the Burrows--Wheeler block sorting transform (BWT) with the syndrome former of an LDPC code. The proposed scheme makes use of a library of LDPC parity­check matrices of different rates and of a simple method to estimate and encode the tree source model from the BWT output. Unlike existing works that use error-correcting codes for data compression, our scheme can deal with sources with memory and achieves lossless compression. Our method offers competitive performance over existing methods such as Lempel­-Ziv ( tt gzip ) and standard BWT--based schemes ( tt bzip ), while being amenable to joint source-channel decoding.