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

Key Contributions

• A high-throughput asymmetric signal codec: lightweight sequential encoder plus massively parallel GPU decoder for server-side batch decompression
• Windowed DCT with hybrid three-zone quantization and Huffman coding with a novel packing scheme
• Evaluation on ten datasets across four signal domains, achieving up to 3.6x compression ratio improvement over existing frameworks

Authors

Ben Mechels, Ryan Billmeyer, Alexander Chen, Shiyang Li, Caiwen Ding

arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.01086, May 2026.

Recommended citation: B. Mechels, R. Billmeyer, A. Chen, S. Li, C. Ding. "FPTC: A Fast Parallel Transform-based Codec for Efficient Asymmetric Signal Compression." arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.01086, 2026.
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