CS2842 Computer Systems – Lecture IV

Data Formats

Dr. Sapumal Ahangama

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

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DATA FORMATS
 Computers
 Process and store all forms of data in binary format

 Human communication
 Includes language, images and sounds

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DATA FORMATS
 Specifications for converting data into computer usable form

 Define the different ways human data may be represented,

stored and processed by a computer

 The data must have the ability to be moved between

computers
 Metadata: information that describes or interprets the meaning of the
data

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DATA FORMATS
 Proprietary formats
 Individual programs can store and process data in any format that
they want

 Standard data representations

 to be used as interfaces between different programs,
 between a program and the I/O devices used by the program,
 between interconnected hardware,
 between systems that share data

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COMMON DATA REPRESENTATIONS

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ALPHANUMERIC DATA
 Much of the data that will be used in a computer are originally
provided in human-readable form,
 Letters of the alphabet, numbers, and punctuation,
 English or some other language

 Alphanumeric data are a combination of alphabetical and

numerical characters

 Since alphanumeric data must be stored and processed within

the computer in binary form, each character must be
translated to a binary representation

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ALPHANUMERIC DATA
 Three alphanumeric codes are in common use,
 ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)
 EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code)
 Unicode

 Nearly every system today uses Unicode or ASCII

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ASCII
 Each character represented with a 7 bit code
 128 characters

 Consists of,
 digits 0 to 9,
 lowercase letters a to z,
 uppercase letters A to Z,
 punctuation symbols,
 33 non-printing control codes

 Extended to 8 bit code – Latin-1

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ASCII

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UNICODE
 ASCII and EBCDIC have limitations
 8-bit word limit the number of possible characters
 Other major languages?
 Omitted characters [, ], ^, {, }, ~

 These issues led to a 16 bit standard – Unicode or UTF-16

 65,536 characters
 49,000 are defined to represent the world’s most used
characters
 6,400 16-bit codes are reserved for private use
 Each character can be stored in 2 bytes

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UNICODE

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UNICODE

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2 CLASSES OF CODE
 Printing characters
 Produced on the screen or printer

 Control characters

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KEYBOARD INPUT
 Scan code
 When a key is struck on the keyboard, the circuitry in the
keyboard generates a binary code

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KEYBOARD INPUT
 Other alphanumeric inputs:
 OCR
 Barcode
 Magnetic Strip Reader
 RFID

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IMAGE DATA
 Images come in many different shapes, sizes, textures, colors,
and shadings
 Different requirements require different forms for image
data
 Quality of the image
 Storage space required
 Time to transmit
 Ease of modification

 Make it difficult to define a single universal format

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IMAGE DATA
 Two distinct categories
 Bitmap or raster images
 Characterized by continuous variations in shading, color, shape, and
texture
 JPEG, GIF

 Graphical objects
 Made up of graphical shapes such as lines and curves that can be
defined geometrically

 The nature of display technology make it much more

convenient and cost effective to display and print most images
as bitmaps

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IMAGE DATA
 Two distinct categories
 Bitmap or raster images
 Characterized by continuous variations in shading, color, shape, and
texture
 JPEG, GIF

 Graphical objects
 Made up of graphical shapes such as lines and curves that can be
defined geometrically

 The nature of display technology make it much more

convenient and cost effective to display and print most images
as bitmaps

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IMAGE DATA

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BITMAP IMAGES
 Bitmap image format
 A rectangular image is divided into rows and columns
 The junction of each row and column is a point known as a pixel
 Pixel is a set of one or more binary numerical values that define the
visual characteristics

 Preferred when image contains large amount of detail and

processing requirements are fairly simple

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BITMAP IMAGES
 Example each point below represented by a 4 bit code corresponding
to 1 of 16 shades
 Meta data
 Pixel data
 Stored from top to bottom one row at a time

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BITMAP IMAGES
 Data value representing a pixel
 Could be as simple as one bit
 For color image, might consist of many bytes
 RGB
 Additional bytes for other characteristics such as transparency and
color correction.

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BITMAP IMAGES
 File size affected by
 Resolution
 Reducing the size of a pixel to improve details
 Levels: number of bits to represent each pixel

 Image formats
 GIF (Graphics Interchange Format)
 JPEG (Joint Photographers Expert Group)
 PNG (Portable Network Graphic)

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OBJECT IMAGES
 Object images are made up of simple elements like straight or
curved lines, circles and arcs etc.
 Each element can defined mathematically by parameters
 Circle requires 3 parameters, Cartesian coordinates + radius
 Straight line needs the coordinates of its end points

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OBJECT IMAGES
 Advantages
 Require less storage space
 Can be manipulated easily

 Photographs as object images?

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VIDEO DATA
 Requires a large amount of data
 1024 × 768 pixel true-color images at a frame rate of 30 frames per
second?
 70.8 megabytes of data per second!
 4.25 gigabytes per minute

 How to reduce video size?

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AUDIO DATA
 Sound is naturally an analog wave that needs to be digitized

 Sampling
 1000 samples per second = 1 KHz (kilohertz)
 Example : Audio CD sampling rate = 44.1KHz

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AUDIO DATA
 Sampling Rate

 Height of each sample saved as,

 8 bit number for radio quality recordings
 16 bit number for high fidelity recordings
 2 x 16 bits for stereo sound

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DATA COMPRESSION
 Compression: reducing data so that it requires fewer bytes of
storage space
 Compression ratio: the amount of file shrunk

 Lossless Compression
 Inverse algorithm restores data to exact original form
 Examples GIF, PCX, TIFF

 05573200001473291000006682732732
 0155732041473291056682732732
 0155Z0314Z91056682ZZ

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DATA COMPRESSION
 Lossy Compression
 Trades off data degradation for file size and download speed
 Much higher compression ratios, often 10 to 1
 JPEG

 MPEG-2?

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THANK YOU

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