A Survey of the Bijective Burrows-Wheeler Transform

The Bijective BWT (BBWT), conceived by Scott in 2007, later summarized in a preprint by Gil and Scott in 2009 (arXiv 2012), is a variant of the Burrows-Wheeler Transform which is bijective: every string is the BBWT of some string. Indeed, the BBWT of a string is the extended BWT [Mantaci et al., 2007] of the factors of its Lyndon factorization. The BBWT has been receiving increasing interest in recent years. In this paper, we survey existing research on the BBWT, starting with its history and motivation. We then present algorithmic topics including construction algorithms with various complexities and an index on top of the BBWT for pattern matching. We subsequently address some properties of the BBWT as a compressor, discussing robustness to operations such as reversal, edits, rotation, as well as compression power. We close with listing other bijective variants of the BWT and open problems concerning the BBWT.