at section 5.5 of the PNG Specification, it discusses this concept in the PNG file format called "CRC" or "Cyclic Redundancy Code". I've never heard of it before, so I'm trying to understand it.
The CRC polynomial employed is
x32 + x26 + x23 + x22 + x16 + x12 + x11 + x10 + x8 + x7 + x5 + x4 + x2 + x + 1
In PNG, the 32-bit CRC is initialized to all 1's, and then the data from each byte is processed from the least significant bit (1) to the most significant bit (128). After all the data bytes are processed, the CRC is inverted (its ones complement is taken). This value is transmitted (stored in the datastream) MSB first. For the purpose of separating into bytes and ordering, the least significant bit of the 32-bit CRC is defined to be the coefficient of the x31 term.
So let me tell you what I understand and what I don't understand about this.
I've heard of polynomials, but in this context I'm a bit confused of how they are implemented here.
In this case, what is "x" supposed to represent? The current bit in the 32-bit looP? Which brings us to the next part:
so it says to make an empty 32-bit number (or rather, all set to 1s, so 32 1s), then it says it's "processed from the least significant bit (1) to the most significant bit (128)", but the question is, the "least...most..significant bit" of what?
Of the other data in the chunk?
How does that work, if the chunk is set in bytes, and this is only 32 bits? What if there are more than 32 bits in the chunk data (which there definitely are?)
Does it mean "least..most..significant bit" of the "polynomial"?
But what does the polynomial represent exactly? What is x^32?
What is x represented by?
Any help with the above questions, and perhaps a simple example with the example IDATA chunk (AKA calculating the CRC chunk for it with basic explanations) would be great:
0 0 2 3 IDAT 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 C
where the last byte "C" should be replaced with that 32-bit CRC thing it was talking about.
Can someone provide me with a practical example?
Beware: If you use (00000000)_2 and (00000001)_2 as the binary representations of the 0s and 1s in your example IDAT chunk, you will compute the CRC incorrectly. The ASCII values of '0' and '1' are 48 = (00110000)_2 and 49 = (00110001)_2; similarly, the ASCII values of 'I', 'D', 'A', and 'T' are 73 = (01001001)_2, 68 = (01000100)_2, 65 = (01000001)_2, and 84 = (01010100)_2. So, assuming you meant the values 0 and 1 rather than the characters ‘0’ and ‘1’, what you must compute the CRC of is (01001001 01000100 01000001 01010100 00000000 00000001 00000000 00000001 00000000 00000001 00000000 00000001 00000000 00000001 00000000)_2.
Inconsequentially to the CRC but consequentially to the validity of the chunk, the length field (i.e., the first 4 bytes) of the chunk should contain the length in bytes of the data only, which is 11, which is the ASCII value of a vertical tab (VT), which is a nonprinting character but can be represented in strings by the hexadecimal escape sequence \x0B (in which (B)_16 = 11). Similarly, the first 3 bytes must contain the character for which the ASCII value is 0 (rather than 48), which is null (NUL), which can be represented in strings by the hexadecimal escape sequence \x00. So, the length field must contain something like "\x00\x00\x00\x0B".