Embodiments of the claimed subject matter provide a method and system for performing data compression by encoding input into Exp-Golomb code. In one embodiment, data compression of data input is achieved via encoding as unsigned Exp-Golomb code. The method is achieved by converting the input, determining the position of the most significant bit in the converted input having a non-zero value (MSB), deriving information from the position of the MSB and arithmetically encoding the information to derive a compressed output.