One of the motivations for creating the Gridfour GVRS API was to assist investigators who were experimenting with different techniques for compressing raster data. To that end, GVRS makes it easy to register new data-compression classes with the existing API so that you can add custom compression functions to GVRS without modifying any of the existing API.

Currently, GVRS uses two internal compression modules: one based on Huffman codes and one based on the well-known Deflate library. For this article, we will explore adding a new compression module based on BZip2. For general data compression applications, BZip2 can produce somewhat better results than Deflate, though it does require more processing time and memory resources to do so.

One reason that BZip2 is not included in our stock software distribution is that the Gridfour Project has adopted a strict rule that the Core Gridfour module does not introduce any secondary dependencies to a Java application. The Core module is pure Java code and depends only on the standard Java API. The Core module has no external dependencies. But, because BZip2 is not part of the standard Java API, adding it to the Core would have required allowing an external dependency. To work around that restriction the GVRS file specification allows an application to register compression classes that belong to libraries external to Core.

Suppose we were to write a compression class called CodecBZip2 that depended on the compression utilities in the Apache Compression Library (commons-compress-1.19.jar or more recent versions). The class could be written by implementing the Gridfour interfaces ICompressionEncoder and ICompressionDecoder

public class CodecBzip2 implements ICompressionEncoder, ICompressionDecoder  {
    public CodecBzip2(){
    }
    // methods from interface as appropriate
}

We'll discuss more about the implementation below. For now, let's look at how the compression could be added to a GvrsFile object.

GvrsFileSpecification spec = new GvrsFileSpecification(nRows, nCols, 90, 120);
spec.addCompressionCodec("BZip2", CodecBzip2.class);  // BZip2 is an arbitrary name for the compressor
spec.setDataCompressionEnabled(true);

File outputFile = new File("Test.gvrs");
GvrsFile gvrs = new GvrsFile(outputFile, spec);
gvrs.setTileCacheSize(GvrsCacheSize.Large);
gvrs.setIndexCreationEnabled(true);

That's it. When the API goes to store the data for the GVRS file, it constructs an instance of the CodecBZip2 class using the default constructor, and then uses that instance to perform data compression. Naturally, this approach leads to three important requirements for a supplemental compressor:

1. GVRS must be able to construct an instance using the default constructor and that instance must be fully initialized and ready for operations when initialized.
2. The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) must be able to find the class supplied as a supplemental compressor in its classpath.
3. The supplemental compressor must implement the interface IGvrsCompressorCodec.

For this article, I implemented the CodecBZip2 class and ran it on the ETOPO1 data set that has been the subject of other "How-to" articles in this series. The results are as follows:

As you can see, the saving was modest, though the additional processing for adding BZip2 to the compression logic made a substantial increase in the application's run time. While the extra processing time is a disadvantage, it would not necessarily disqualify BZip2 as an alternate solution to Deflate. In applications that use data compression, it is common to write data in a compressed form just once, but to read it back multiple times. Like many data compression techniques, BZip2 requires substantially more processing to compress data, than to decompress it. So the extra processing for compression would be a one-time expense for the data producer, but would not affect the data consumers.

Details of how the Gridfour compressors work will be the subject of a future wiki article. For now, it is sufficient to note that GVRS compresses the tiles in a data file individually. Each time a tile is written to the file, GVRS tries each registered compression method and picks the one that yields the largest reduction in data storage size.

Each of the existing compression methods uses Predictive-Transform methods to improve the compressability of the data. There are 3 predictive-transform models currently supported: Differencing, Linear, and Triangle. The statistics below show which compression methods (Huffman, Deflate, and BZip2) were used for compression and which predictor. In the stock setup, Deflate usually produces better results, except for about 20 percent of the tiles for which Huffman works better. It turns out that BZip2 works well for the same kind of data as Deflate (both look for patterns in the data). So in most cases where Deflate would have been used, BZip2 was preferred.

The following statistics were issued through a call to

gvrs.summarize(System.out, true)

which was invoked after the storage of the GVRS output file was complete. The times-used column indicates the number of tiles (and the percent of all tiles) for which a particular method was selected.

Codec GvrsHuffman
   Predictor                Times Used        bits/sym   entropy     avg bits in tree/tile
   Differencing              393 ( 1.8 %)      1.9         2.3          205.4/20487.5
   Linear                   1572 ( 7.3 %)      2.9         2.9          744.3/30985.3
   Triangle                 3956 (18.3 %)      3.7         4.0          773.9/39829.3
   DifferencingWithNulls       0 ( 0.0 %)      0.0         0.0            0.0/0.0
Codec GvrsDeflate
   Predictor               Times Used         bits/sym   entropy     avg bits per tile
   Differencing              205 ( 0.9 %)      1.6         2.0         17037.2
   Linear                    179 ( 0.8 %)      5.3         5.6         56868.0
   Triangle                 1856 ( 8.6 %)      7.1         6.8         77096.0
   DifferencingWithNulls       0 ( 0.0 %)      0.0         0.0            0.0
Codec BZip2
   Predictor               Times Used         bits/sym   entropy     avg bits per tile
   Differencing             1269 ( 5.9 %)      1.2         1.4         13022.2
   Linear                    954 ( 4.4 %)      2.2         2.6         24079.9
   Triangle                11216 (51.9 %)      4.7         5.4         50511.5
   DifferencingWithNulls       0 ( 0.0 %)      0.0         0.0            0.0

For this article, the structure of the BZip2 compressor was very similar to the existing Deflate compressor class included in the Gridfour code distribution. So implementing CodecBZip2 was just a matter of copying the existing CodecDeflate compressor and replacing the calls to the Java Deflate API with calls to the Apache Compress BZip2 API.

However, it is important to note that the fact that we chose to simply refactor an existing module doesn't mean that all alternate compression techniques need to do the same thing. One of the ideas of GVRS is to provide as much room for experimentation and variation as possible. So if you do wish to write your own compressor variation, feel free to do things differently.

The experiment with the BZip2 compression only explored a small fraction of the possible techniques that could have been tried in my efforts to reduce the size of the output file. But it does illustrate the potential of custom compressors to extend the capabilities of the Gridfour Core library.

If you choose to conduct your own investigations, we look forward to hearing about your results. Who knows? Perhaps you may discover techniques that substantially reduce the storage required for GVRS-based data products.