Packet-based universal bit-field masking coding using configurable sparsity information

An apparatus for compressing data, comprising:

• at least one memory;
• and
• at least one processor coupled to the at least one memory, the at least one processor configured to:
• obtain, from a first buffer, a compressed data packet including at least a first packet header corresponding to a plurality of compressed sub-packets, a first sub-packet header corresponding to a first compressed sub-packet generated based on removing one or more sparsity bytes from a first sequence of values corresponding to a first sub-packet, and one or more non-sparsity bytes included in the first sequence of values, wherein each sparsity byte of the one or more sparsity bytes is equal to a configured sparsity value and each non-sparsity byte of the one or more non-sparsity bytes corresponds to a respective data value different from the configured sparsity value, wherein the first sub-packet header is indicative of a respective location within the first sequence of values of each non-sparsity byte of the one or more non-sparsity bytes, and wherein the first packet header is indicative of the configured sparsity value and respective coding information corresponding to each compressed sub-packet of the plurality of compressed sub-packets;
• decode the compressed data packet to generate a data packet;
• and
• output the data packet to a second buffer.