FPTC: A Fast Parallel Transform-based Codec for Efficient Asymmetric Signal Compression

2026-05-01

AI Summary

Existing signal compression methods struggle to simultaneously achieve efficient encoding, high-fidelity reconstruction, and high-throughput decoding on resource-constrained devices, while also lacking cross-domain generalizability. This work proposes an asymmetric codec architecture featuring a lightweight serial encoder paired with a massively parallel GPU-based decoder. By leveraging windowed discrete cosine transform (DCT) to exploit sparsity in the frequency domain, and introducing a tri-zone hybrid quantization scheme coupled with a novel Huffman packing strategy, the approach optimizes both compression efficiency and GPU throughput. Evaluated across ten datasets spanning four distinct modalities, the method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art techniques, achieving 1.2–3.6× higher compression ratios while preserving high reconstruction quality and enabling scalable, high-speed decoding—thus delivering a universal, efficient, and scalable solution for signal compression.

Abstract

Modern high-performance computing and Internet-of-Things deployments increasingly generate large volumes of signal data that must be compressed efficiently on resource-constrained acquisition devices and decompressed at scale on centralized servers. Lossy compression is widely adopted to minimize storage and transmission costs on low-power hardware sensors, yet existing methods rarely optimize for both reconstruction quality and decompression throughput simultaneously, nor do they apply methods that generalize across signal domains. In this work, we introduce FPTC, a high-throughput asymmetric signal codec that pairs a lightweight sequential encoder with a massively parallel GPU decoder designed for server-side batch decompression. FPTC applies a windowed discrete cosine transform (DCT) to exploit frequency-domain sparsity, quantizes spectral coefficients with a hybrid three-zone mapping, and entropy codes the result using Huffman coding with a novel packing scheme. The pipeline used in FPTC is designed to be throughput oriented on the GPU, maximizing performance without sacrificing reconstruction quality. We evaluate FPTC on ten datasets spanning four signal domains: biomedical diagnostic, seismic reflections, power-grid production metrics, and meteorological recordings. Our results demonstrate that FPTC outperforms existing frameworks in compression ratio while maintaining competitive throughput, achieving multiplicative compression performance of 3.6x (power), 3.1x (meteorological), 1.5x (biomedical), and 1.2x (seismic) over existing frameworks.

Problem

• asymmetric compression
• signal compression
• throughput optimization
• reconstruction quality
• cross-domain generalization

Innovation

• asymmetric codec
• parallel GPU decoding
• windowed DCT
• hybrid quantization
• throughput-oriented compression