Abstract: An approach for gathering, encoding and transmitting histogram data mitigates the need for transmission resources by compressing the gathered data in a lossless, stateless manner for transmission. A generally sparse data set benefits from an encoding mechanism based on a bit plane arrangement of the raw data. The approach organizes bit planes in a sequential manner, and then encodes values based on intervals of non-zero bit positions. By traversing a sequential string based on the bit plane, each “run” of zeroes tends to produce relatively small values, easing encoding burdens, but also accommodated larger values when necessary. A selective encoding technique invokes different encoding processes based on the magnitude of the interval, to allow use of an encoding that stores each respective value in the fewest bits. Different encoding techniques are applied based on ranges of the interval magnitude, or zero run.