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In computer science and information theory, a Huffman code is a particular type of optimal prefix code that is commonly used for lossless data compression.The process of finding or using such a code is Huffman coding, an algorithm developed by David A. Huffman while he was a Sc.D. student at MIT, and published in the 1952 paper "A Method for the Construction of Minimum-Redundancy Codes".
The optimal length-limited Huffman code will encode symbol i with a bit string of length h i. The canonical Huffman code can easily be constructed by a simple bottom-up greedy method, given that the h i are known, and this can be the basis for fast data compression. [2]
Adaptive Huffman coding (also called Dynamic Huffman coding) is an adaptive coding technique based on Huffman coding. It permits building the code as the symbols are being transmitted, having no initial knowledge of source distribution, that allows one-pass encoding and adaptation to changing conditions in data.
Canonical Huffman codes address these two issues by generating the codes in a clear standardized format; all the codes for a given length are assigned their values sequentially. This means that instead of storing the structure of the code tree for decompression only the lengths of the codes are required, reducing the size of the encoded data.
The two codes (the 288-symbol length/literal tree and the 32-symbol distance tree) are themselves encoded as canonical Huffman codes by giving the bit length of the code for each symbol. The bit lengths are themselves run-length encoded to produce as compact a representation as possible.
A Huffman code is a variable-length string of bits that identifies a unique token. A Huffman-threaded interpreter locates subroutines using an index table or a tree of pointers that can be navigated by the Huffman code. Huffman-threaded code is one of the most compact representations known for a computer program. The index and codes are chosen ...
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The standard way to represent a signal made of 4 symbols is by using 2 bits/symbol, but the entropy of the source is 1.73 bits/symbol. If this Huffman code is used to represent the signal, then the entropy is lowered to 1.83 bits/symbol; it is still far from the theoretical limit because the probabilities of the symbols are different from negative powers of two.