Move-to-front and permutation based inversion coding

[Summary form only given]. Introduced by Bentley et al (1986), move-to-front (MTF) coding is an adaptive, self-organizing list (permutation) technique. Motivated with the MTF coder's utilization of small size permutations which are restricted to the data source's alphabet size, we investigate compression of data files by using the canonical sorting permutations followed by permutation based inversion coding (PBIC) from the set of {0, ..., n-1}, where n is the size of the data source. The technique introduced yields better compression gain than the MTF coder and improves the compression gain in block sorting techniques.