Data compression in computerized signal processing for isocratic chromatography

A data compression technique for isocratic liquid or isothermal gas chromatography is introduced that effectively stores the information contained in the chromatogram in a reduced-size array. The resulting compressed peaks have an approximately uniform width, which is an obvious advantage for the peak detection and integration algorithm. For identification, the apparent retention times in the compressed array are used, the reproducibility of which does not deteriorate with respect to the original signal. Some improvement of the signal-to-noise ratio is seen.