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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]
The greedy algorithm, which builds up a set by incrementally adding the element which increases the most at each step, produces as output a set that is at least (/) (). [8] That is, greedy performs within a constant factor of ( 1 − 1 / e ) ≈ 0.63 {\displaystyle (1-1/e)\approx 0.63} as good as the optimal solution.
Since a canonical Huffman codebook can be stored especially efficiently, most compressors start by generating a "normal" Huffman codebook, and then convert it to canonical Huffman before using it. In order for a symbol code scheme such as the Huffman code to be decompressed, the same model that the encoding algorithm used to compress the source ...
Second and third bits: Encoding method used for this block type: 00: A stored (a.k.a. raw or literal) section, between 0 and 65,535 bytes in length; 01: A static Huffman compressed block, using a pre-agreed Huffman tree defined in the RFC; 10: A dynamic Huffman compressed block, complete with the Huffman table supplied; 11: Reserved—don't use.
A suffix code is a set of words none of which is a suffix of any other; equivalently, a set of words which are the reverse of a prefix code. As with a prefix code, the representation of a string as a concatenation of such words is unique. A bifix code is a set of words which is both a prefix and a suffix code. [8]
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.
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 ...