Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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]
Instructions to generate the necessary Huffman tree immediately follow the block header. The static Huffman option is used for short messages, where the fixed saving gained by omitting the tree outweighs the percentage compression loss due to using a non-optimal (thus, not technically Huffman) code. Compression is achieved through two steps:
When naively Huffman coding binary strings, no compression is possible, even if entropy is low (e.g. ({0, 1}) has probabilities {0.95, 0.05}). Huffman encoding assigns 1 bit to each value, resulting in a code of the same length as the input. By contrast, arithmetic coding compresses bits well, approaching the optimal compression ratio of
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.
To make the code a canonical Huffman code, the codes are renumbered. The bit lengths stay the same with the code book being sorted first by codeword length and secondly by alphabetical value of the letter: B = 0 A = 11 C = 101 D = 100 Each of the existing codes are replaced with a new one of the same length, using the following algorithm:
Modified Huffman coding is used in fax machines to encode black-on-white images . It combines the variable-length codes of Huffman coding with the coding of repetitive data in run-length encoding . The basic Huffman coding provides a way to compress files with much repeating data, like a file containing text, where the alphabet letters are the ...
For this reason, Shannon–Fano codes are almost never used; Huffman coding is almost as computationally simple and produces prefix codes that always achieve the lowest possible expected code word length, under the constraints that each symbol is represented by a code formed of an integral number of bits. This is a constraint that is often ...