US Patent 9047118 Computationally efficient compression of floating-point data

Compression of floating-point numbers is realized by comparing the exponents of the floating-point numbers to one or more exponent thresholds to classify the floating-point numbers and to apply different compression types to the different classes. Each class and compression type is associated with an indicator. An indicator array contains M indicators for M floating-point numbers. The position of the indicator in the indicator array corresponds to one of the floating-point numbers and the indicator value specifies the class and compression type. The floating-point number is encoded in accordance with the compression type for its class. A compressed data packet contains the indicator array and up to M encoded floating-point numbers. Decompression extracts the indicator array and the encoded floating-point numbers from the compressed data packet and decodes the encoded floating-point numbers in accordance with the compression type associated with the indicator value to form a reconstructed floating-point number.