AN ARCHITECTURE FOR LOSSY COMPRESSION OF WAVE-FORMS USING PIECEWISE-LINEAR APPROXIMATION

Lossy compression schemes are often desirable in many signal processin g applications such as the compression of ECG data. This paper present s a relaxation of a provably good algorithm for lossy signal compressi on, based on the piecewise linear approximation of functions. The algo rithm approximates the data within a given tolerance using a piecewise linear function. The paper also describes an architecture suitable fo r the single-chip implementation of the proposed algorithm. The design consists of control, two multiply/divide units, four adder/subtracter units, and an I/0 interface unit. For uniformly sampled data, no divi sion is required, and all operations can be completed in a pipelined m anner in at most three cycles per sample point. The corresponding simp lified architecture is also presented.