Graph automorphisms for compression

Abstract Detecting automorphisms is a natural way to identify redundant information presented in structured data. When such redundancies are detected they can be used for data compression. In this paper we explore two different classes of graphs to capture this intuitive property of automorphisms. Symmetry-compressible graphs are the first class which introduces the basic concepts but use only global symmetries for the compression. In order for this concept to be more practical, we need to use local symmetries. Thus, we extend the basic graph class with Near Symmetry compressible graphs. Furthermore, we develop two algorithms that can be used to compress practical instances and empirically evaluate them on a set of realistic graphs.