Offline RLE compression

[rainwoodman]

Offline RLE compression on a single Column

RLEBLOB files are compressed with the run-length-encoding. It shall be type aware.
There shall be some kind of dynamic range compensation for efficient encoding of clustered data.

The compression algorithm shall automatically identify from the linear sequence, clusters of contiguous samples that can be represented by a centroid, and a sequence of 'fluctuations' of a much lower dynamic range.
Integral types, this shall be loss-less; for floating points, this can be lossy.

For spatial positions this can be very effective. Notice that the centroid shall be the same shape as the member. And the dynamic range of the fluctuations can be different per member.

[ ] design the file format

[ ] tool to compress and decompress a single BLOB file.

[ ] add interface in bigfile.c to randomly seek and read from RLE BLOB files.